I am about to be 23

( a happy acompanyment, on 2 or 3 levels www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7FqUNlEdwA )


23! What an surprise that is!
In hope of fending off  impending old-bastardom I've dyed my hair orange, a sure fire way of making oneself look 'younger and mentaler'..oh yeah, giz a job?

What have I achieved? I've lied so many times about what GCSE's I have I can't remember whether I  have, even a conservative 8.  I've got 3 AS levels; 2 D's in photography and psychology, and a U in philosophy. I can't even say for certain whether I've a degree because we get the marks tomorrow! Happy birthday, yeah?!

I've only ever broken my chin and coxicxix (the arse bone, however it's spelled), and most significantly, I've never died.
On the subject, and as I'm moving further and further from morose teenage liscence to be morbid, (two sad posts in a row is pushing it) Ill take this last opportunity to say this;

It both breaks my heart, and infuriates me on many levels, that trailblazing-troll and all-round cool-guy Dave Richmond, will never see the fruits of  his labour-

Time was, any man (not women who weren't allowed, much like the vote) could edit Wikipedia, lacing it with lies so pointless, they would often never be discovered.
Enter Dave's habit of writing himself into things, with the specific lie about  notable Byker Grove character 'drug dealer Dave Richmond from Whitley Bay whose trademark act of violence was the 'Whitley Smile'' whic has  now been sewn into so many sloppy, aspsuemed, false nostalic pieces of 'informtion' online.
It's strange to think that people will be now unconsicously straining out fake memories of Dave Richmond from whitley bay, and now memories is all there is...stranger still, come to think, a truth that has become resembling in a way the detail of that originally false article, is, coincidently, that a great number of folk have in tribute to Daves tattoo, an Acid house smiley face inked into them..a smiley mark for life..life/art/fact/fiction/WHAT!?


Christ alive. After all that meta-tradge, I'll leave you on another tone - a card arrived yesterday from my Nana.  I cannot fail to be impressed by her almost valiant attempt to ignore my personality, or style, or whatever you want to call it. Any other card really, would have been more suited. Here it is :

The thing is, me and my nana are no strangers. It's not like she lived in like Lancaster and I only saw her at Christmas. My nana lived on the same estate, one street round from me, approximately 2 minutes walk, 45 seconds full sprint. I went to her house 3 times week for tea!

And yet I am gifted with a card that seems to feature quite accurate  portraits of the kind of girls who gave me grief in school for wearing black nail varnish and smoking dope.

At 23 I am not going to change my scruffy-lass stripes. This reminds me of  the pictures she showed me of me standing in the back yard miserably dressed as a 'Lyons maid'; I'm still not quite sure what one of those is, suggesting it was not my idea.

I also quite appreciate that her message is written with quotation marks around it .  I will indeed be seeing my nana soon, as I will be staying at her house, right where I used to live, for a day or two. Back to square one. And if I do fail my degree, I can just stay there forever and ever, and I wont have to think about london ever again, and I can only eat chip sandwiches, or crisp sandwiches, because I'll be under the roof of the woman who came out with the corker "what about...Is bacon meat?"

Mind you, she's fuckin amazing!

OH by the way, click >>heeeereeeee<<!

Conceptual Boyfriend

About a week ago another talented life-force and sweet girl left us.

It's always stark that lazies, miseries, do-nothings or divas grind away into old, old age..
Goodbye Ari up, Poly Styrene, Donna Summer - yet still old Stones keep rolling

Goodbye bright friends, hello again old wretches.
Not to try to apply value structures to that which is, always tortuously, unchangeable anyway.

Here's to Hilary Donald -a fine artist who lived it.  X

5 AM at Our House

And it Did.

As per-fahkin, we were the only house round here who made any effort for the queens jubilee at all .

Faced with rainy street parties, we made our way to central London, which could only be described as Hell and a terrifying glimpse of the Olympics to come. We had an invite to a party, a dangerously genuine affair,  offering again, a birds eye view onto everyone having a much worse time in the pouring rainy crowded streets. My advice now stands on royal affairs - take to the sky.  Here's some postcards for you to send to any people you may know in the commonwealth.

Red Matt Baker?  That they allowed Mr Baker any Royal airtime after this little incident of gross disrespect for the ruling class is typical indeed of the BBC coverage of the day, which was broadly surreal, and included at least one very inappropriate joke about torture and Iran. Ameture's hour aside..

                                                     Hatched-faced jubilee to one and all.

 6 stolen chocolate mousses later and we were on the roof, allowing us a laugh at all the little people.

It's that time again. The British people, whipped into frenzy, display their talent for scaling previously unconsidered objects in their pursuit of a better view of a screen.

So it did reign, enough to ruin everyones cowie-buzz.
Fegan was his usual self, showing off about Chelsea and penalties, shouting about James Hewitt, stuffing his face..

And I think it's fair to say by the end of the proceedings I could tell Matthew Silcox and Abigale Jones were starting to feel rather tired by all the excitement.

So, I went and met up with Dylan Edge / Mortimer, (famous actor) and Ryan Siddal (tortured artist) ((both not pictured)) and got pissed. Until next time..

Long To Rain Over Us

Whilst purchasing the three or so appealing items Iceland stocks, I noticed their displaying a new advertising banner reading 'That's why Ma'ams shop at Iceland!'
Now,  I'm not trying to be horrible or anything, but my initial suspicion on reading this was actually, that the Queen probably does NOT shop at Iceland-  a suspicion, which by point of the checkout, had developed into grave conviction that to suggest so constitutes no less than insult and Treason.

Tomorrow, a dear friend of mine (we made our acquaintance exchanging our shared taste in the noble art of Ruining Things, coincidentally) has seen fit to organize a subtly titled " FUCK THE JUBILEE " street party. My feeling about these things is always that a party is a party. But I like parties, so I don't care.
On the Royal wedding, WE THE PEOPLE had in our possession, an occupied ex-jobcentre in Deptford - this was just after Poly Styrene died, so we had a huge roof-full blasting 'Spex etc, and, er, it was amazin'. Earlier that day I'd ventured into central London to document, it transpired, the poor ignoramuses of this country who thought that they'd pop down from Leicester, or Leyton Buzzard, or Leigh, or whatever it was and get a glimpse of our white young hopes, our Royal mid-to-highnesses -
No such luck, a huge fence had been erected around the entire City of Westminster, so thousands of poor, Union Jack-decked buggers were locked out of the Nation, reduced to craning through shop windows, and in one bizzare moment, scaling the fences of green park in vain attempt to see It, Anything, even a screen. Here's a few shots, and apology about the quality of the scans but this is just off the cuff..

(John Major appears to have infected everyone with his greyness in this series, perhaps explaining why he was not invited to the official event.)


Any way, the point is Things Are Different, for me at least anyway, this time.
Last year I was content to wear a Union Jack t-shirt myself, ride high on the fluffy cloud of irony and indifference, fagged out from recent protestations reaching the dank depths of caring far too recently anyway.
Not so this weekend. Our household has constructed  our very own jubilee decorations to drag to New Cross for the celebrations, using the golden technique of 'being so nauseatingly sycophantic as to be indisputably sarcastic, however to an extent which would not stand up as evidence in court'  in the construction of these monuments, which you will no doubt see in the very near future.

As everybody knows, there ain't no crack in the Union Jack, a point which rammed home hard as I sat flicking through an old Select magazine, from 1998. Pulp on the cover, Father Ted feature, Spiritualized, Bernard Butler, etc, etc etc, etc.
This true time-piece, choking hegemonic relic of Brit-pop's overbearing, ingratiating dieing days featured on almost every page some now-'seminal' something or other,  inviting one a dangerous nostalgia for some kind of identification to a dominant popular culture.
This is the sort of thing that get's you thinking about the past, present, future. Shortly after,  I climbed under my old school desk taken from Goldsmiths to retrieve a plug, with a strange mix of revulsion and joy at my head brushing against some stone age chewing gum deposited under there from godknowswhen, it struck me - When, oh When can we move on? Do not assume the irony of wishing this whilst in the same time subjecting myself to reading 15 year out of date magazines is lost on me, but the problematic comes in that, actually, if you favour the physical, there aren't any now.

We, left in this physical world, find it derelicted.   Perhaps you have noticed, more and more people are dropping like flies from websites like facebook.  My main reason, personally for this, is that more important than the wasting one's hours, weeks, days and years on unfulfilling, fillering, voyeuristic, over-public shite; is the waste of Wit.

If you're wondering why all the freshness you long for illudes you, consider this; Since they got clever enough, the literary efforts of a younger generation have been pissed down the plug-hole of first MSN conversations, later Facebook status updates, dissapearing into the ether of sharp blue and white aloof detachment.

We who don't have these social engagements in our bedrooms, find ourselves out on the now deserted dystopian streets of night-time Deptford, watching H&M film a commercial, whilst security hold back the usual occupants of the high street, who can only, and untruly shout "I PAY MY BUMBERCLAT COUNCIL TAX"   as the vainly try to breach the lines out of stark reality and into, again we find, the dream, the screen..

Ascending the back stairs of a flat, choking through a Parker, on advice to 'hold your breath as much as you can because a one of the rats's got under there and died' to watch this soap from the balcony, the Gods, it is entirely forgivable to momentarily forget how to spell the word 'future'.
A glance at the peeping Canary Wharf, over the distant roofs, reassures one, for a moment, but, drizzle-drivven back in-doors, and listening to newly-remastered Beatles recordings of songs you've not heard in 12 years, time-quake shudders are felt afresh.  We're way off the Richter.

This is the supermegapresentfuture.  The filth of the past with none of the well made appliances or attractive commercial packaging .
I've typed 'Dystopian' - Google underlines it as an incorrect spelling,  it's only suggestion being 'Utopian'. Funny, uh?

'Where are all the angry young men and women, where are all the good young bands?' ask the same 40+'s who increasingly tell you how 'sorry' the feel for 'your generation, it's so difficult.'
My theory is this- as with terrible would-be writers, there are man millions terrible would-be musicians in the world.  The people you want writing, and writing music, are too rightly, debilitatingly impassioned, in-awed and categorically well-informed about music past to dare step up to the mantle, discarding every riff on the creeping suspicion that it rips off a Warsaw demo, Googling every inspiring turn of phrase, to discover it's the title of a long-abandoned blog. 

When you look at some of the faces in the above photographs, (most notably the girl propped up with a flag, and one of those slum-clearance-documentation expressions) it's clear that in all this acceleration, nothing's really changed, merely our exposure levels- another thing one is encouraged, in this Utopia, not to have to mind, with digital cameras et al, taking care of all that.  The very first photograph in the essay, was on the same roll as the Wedding lot, and was probably the last photo I took of the Marden estate when I had a claim to the place, as my mother's moved on..

It could be any time ever, because nothing ever, ever, ever changes there. You know what to do,  Because, God, who wants to..<<<<<<<<<<

Our Gillian

North shields, awld wimmmin, get a bargain

My

Dears, I'm sorry, I've so neglected you. I've been busy running up and down the country, avoiding colds and flues, and finishing university. Here's a wee video, and an accompanying essay. More soon, OAO. x



'‘Anthropology has had no lack of interest in the visual; its problem has always been what to do with it.‘ (MacDougal 1997)

I understand anthropology as an endeavor, primarily of understanding culture - one’s own, and that of the many ‘Others’. The well documented problem of early ethnographers to empathise and integrate properly so they may understand another culture, manifested itself most dramatically in the sphere of religious belief - belief in forces - even from a less personally invested, agnostic viewpoint - seemingly at odds with the world of the rational, pragmatic, western anthropologist. 
Turner, and Evans-Pritchard (1962, 1975) gave unpartisan, positive, placating experiential accounts of living the reality of the Witchcrafts they encountered, later Rosaldo (1993) shone a light on the most remarkable transference of belief and will only after an extreme empirical breakthrough in the event of always-unexplainable, universal ascent from life. 
Not just through belief but through the myriad of learned cultural communications in an alien language -jokes, sarcasms, lies, and the like- and through differences even so far as in which of the physical sense are primary - sound or vision?(Gell 1995)- must the anthropologist attempt to completely tilt with their new, every-day mooring of reality. 

Additive to the anthropologist’s struggle through foundational, opposite aspects of culture, is how to put it on a page. When one’s unthinking habits are transcribed, with utmost seriousness into academia, it can on inspection provoke a bemused dismissal of irreverence. Rosaldo again remarks upon this in a short essay, illustrated by his example of sitting at a breakfast table a relatives house and parodying a running commentary, in classic ethnographic descriptive style, of the family’s morning routine, much to their amusement. He then goes on to describe how subjective his supposed objectivity was - by drawing on his not fully formed knowledges and opinions of the family’s histories and relations to each other, and even his mood at the time. (Rosaldo.1993) And this is in a western and fully familiar - even emotionally- environment. 
So the gulf of possible interpretation, presentation and subsequent scholarly analysis can be logically
 assumed to increase exponentially, the more alien the surroundings.1
 What we are confronted with, in attempting, without even getting into the possible philosophical or existential futility surrounding even this task, is a world so divided by so many different factors, from street to house, town to city, country to continent. With so many abstract macro economic and political forces also at play, on show, and in ever-increasing communicated medium, it can become difficult to know what we are looking to find, and what we are seeking to achieve?
 As Deleuze mused, upon self-reflectiveness in thought, that ‘..everything is so “complicated”, that I might be another..For we are so sure of living again (without resurrection) only because so many beings and things think in us’.(2004) 
So what can the visual do, in it’s instantaneous, highly communal, empirical character, that we may be able to try to experience, the reality of others? 
It’s method may not have to lie in attempting a hyper-reality - as this is still to some extent subjective; which way is the camera pointing, who is talking, what have they at stake in their testimony? 
It is for all these subjective truths that I see fit to attempt to take a surrealist approach, that concentrates not through the filter of spoken communication but is provided a soundtrack constructed, as has been attempted throughout history by the utopian-minded since the myth of babel, of number - rather than simply trying to transcribe this back into corruptible, linguistic form, I intend to apply this to shape, sound and vision. 
 Moving beyond ethics, morals and social conscious Visual anthropology has the chance to work with the unconscious.

The basic premise of the film I have produced2 is that I shall be presenting, eventually, through the pulsating mass of voices, messages, noise and cultural debris one wades through in a packed, multicultural metropolis, a clearer experiential method of empathizing with persons with whom one does not share knowledge or friendship - as well as the obvious previously outlined differences in linguistic cognition.

A soundtrack is formed through the usual crowd snippets of conversation that accompany a journey in the city, overlaid with a speech concerning the point of the piece read by many different voices, with visual accompaniment of city scenes, particularly in busy places such as Deptford junk market, strewn with unwanted items of all calibers. In the final few minutes this develops into music which attempts to fulfill the aim outlined in the soundtrack before, creating a droning trancelike harmonies, made by putting letter shapes into a Spectrograph3. The pictures which accompany this, instead of big anonymous crowds and strangers focus in on individuals slowly with their permission and interaction. 

Not claiming to be absolutely accurate scientifically or psychologically, but working fromthe academic point of view that an allegory can be used for understanding in a certain way, 
the project utilizes one alphabets shapes and numbers into sound and harmonies, as a way of experiencing in a more immediate way, specially selected ‘unificationary’ words.

This is intended to create a trancelike empathy through messages contained in the music, which is formed out of a highly significant system. 
The alphabet chosen in this short example is the Hebrew alphabet, many reasons including that it is a ‘holy alphabet’, and thus has numbers ascribed to letters, which in turn are used, through a system called Gematria, to form links and patterns with other words and phrases, lending meaning here and there. The assumption behind this technique is that the interrelatedness is not coincidence, it is ‘Gods speech’.(Parfitt 1988) 




























































In this current period of history, a technological revolution in communication has given us the enshrouding concept of the ‘global village’, the ‘global information society’. We are supposedly united in a democratic republic of technology, different languages transcribed but still transferred and not experienced. We see and hear each other through an ‘empire of 0’s and 1’s’(2.2003). What Mattelart calls ‘the ideology that dare not speak its name‘ is an accelerating force of action and experience. ‘Apps’, instantaneous preformed functional technological applications become a dominant form of connection to some sort of pulse. At the same time as scholars revisited the early utopian yearning for a universal language, in the 17th and 18th centuries, the rise of rationalism in this enlightenment made the ‘cult of numbers‘ concrete. Developments in mathematical reason constructed a prototype for truthful discourse, measuring ideological value as well as the logical. 


Shapes and symbols are recurring as significant through certain modes of philosophical and psychological thought, the psychoanalyst Jung theorizing heavily on so called “Mandalas”, symmetrical totemic patters and crests created to represent meaning, drawing aesthetically from both religious and mathematical symbology as well as more ingrained social symbolisms, as evident in paintings from the Romantic and Symbolism period. These recurring shapes, circles with crosses, and other shapes contained themselves carry similarities to commonly produced generic examples i analysis of children's first attempts to draw and express themselves graphically. 
 




























By enacting these symbolisms in the ways in which new technology will allow, it is possible to experience them off the page and thus more subconsciously, and this is why I have taken a music approach. 
 In studying more transcendental ways of experiencing theory, I revisited the work of american 20th century Beat poets, particularly the Dream Machine, as brought into being by Brion Gynsin. This machine, which it is easy to make following mathematical calculations cutting holes in cardboard, affixing this to a 45rpm turntable (originally designed for a 78 but with calculations changed to accommodate new turntables), funnels a light, placed in the centre, through onto the closed lids of the eye at the rhythm said to emulate that of the Alpha frequencies in the human brain, which are highly active when dreaming. The machines are used for relaxing, losing consciousness and spacial awareness and basically simulating symbolic lucidity in the mind. 
 I made one of these machines and used some of the flickers recorded to overlay onto my footage when the trancelike parts are supposed to be enacted. 






















 
 
 







 






























What I have wanted to create is an experience that does not have to be analyzed moralistically or ethically, common preoccupations of anthropology a a discipline, that shows both life as it exists and strives for understanding on another level difficult, for cultural reasons, to attain. I made mention of a psychoanalyst earlier, and while I do not find fundamentals of such disciplines infallibly true it is worth considering, as Mircea Eliade (1976) did, that theories, such as Freud’s, however denounced by academics including respected anthropologists as they were, nevertheless were extremely popular to the layman, and cemented themselves into culture, perhaps reveling something in their popularity. 

I shall end by presenting the soundtrack spoken throughout the first half of the film, for clarity. 
 ‘Compared with music all communication by words is shameless; words dilute and brutalize; words depersonalize; words make the uncommon common. Is it that those who speak different languages inhabit different sensory universes? That structures of different language as the foundationary process for thought means that the sense world is experienced in different grammatical orders; and therefore entirely differently in terms of significance,immediacy..is that just a blue cat or is that cat blue? Which defines, is defined by, can be forgiven, prejudiced, how does this affect our mood? In any metropolis one is surrounded by hundreds of ‘world world’ commentaries inside our co-inhabitants. If Rome is the eternal city, London is the village ad infinitum, tracelessly changing constantly, devolving into ever more globing complexities, dirts, residues . Here we are a mass of different thought structures, to add complexity to our different personalities and value systems. Language shapes perception, but there are other languages of behaviour life-long-learned, indentured by the physicality of surroundings. A further problem that comes in trying to understand another’s beliefs, of existing truly within the other’s ‘Every-day’ is fraught with more layers than usual of functional, theoretical cul-de-sacs of applied contextuality, when combined with the troublesomeness of an alien semiotics. Cultural fictions, tidily tied up definitive theories capture the public imagination of what surely must constitute the public. Fictions are the first kind of story we hear as children, and transport us to a world where everything is known, contained, just so. What aesthetic provides a profane for every sacred? Provides the backdrop that communication aspires beyond in spite of? What 2 and 3D structures provide fodder for the 4th dimension of time, life, emotion, experience? The sights and sounds that form the hypnotic repetition of the every day? What gnosis is inherent and inherited from which patterned wall paper? Each culture has it’s identity-styles, to shape and be shaped by the language which holds it captive. Could these shapes be the key to the unconscious of another? Is Pattern recognition the necessary shortcut to embracing another Familiar? A solution of understanding ones situation en mass, micro and macrocosmically, quantifiably and allegorically, is irresistible to anyone, and the lure of such Laws have shown themselves in humankind's ancient devotion to Dogmas, in modern periods called fads ; despite protestation to their falsehood, nevertheless obliviously and gleefully bound into becoming The Popular Way, the public unconscious, wants, needs, nostalgias, and drives, if pushed to analyze For a philosophy to be a-la-mode, it need not be true. The gaping hole of secularism reason and ration in the west is plugged with various yearnings for humility, mystery, unity taking shape in romantic youth cultures, fight cultures, shopping cultures, cult cultures, Occultisms, new-ageisms, psychoactive drug trends the latter all aiming at some very defined graphic allegorical map for the senses. Music isa complex cultural universals, a pathway to physical response, we understand as a group, often suspended from traditional time, depending on a more varied narrative than the traditional beginning, middle, end. Music relies on number, and here we may embody the globally indisputable logic of mathematics. These Numbers have helped form false or holy hermetic links in the formation of human thought If we could combine all these nationalisms, cliche’s, stereotypes, over a bonafide numerical algorithm, deducted through our few universals, patterns, leaps in the dark, could we provide this empirical fiction with which we could shortcut conscious reason and complexity and dive into an experience mapped culturally by the existing graphic elements surrounding them? Fictions are the first things we understand as children, as we learn to tell our own tales. If we use sound to embody a shape can we feel it as a word that made sense, would it resonate? This may all be an illusion’.