Ace Jet 170

The Flockers

Do Penguins flock? Not sure. Probably. Although certainly not the paperback kind; they seem a little thin on the ground nowadays. It's taken me about 6 months to pull together this handful…Well, I say "handful", but I mean "handful" as in a slightly freaky, Anne Boleynesque six-fingered handful. (No offence, any sextedigiters out there!).

The book are now on Flickr.

Airstrip

Found Swissness.

Mac(kerel)Book Pro

Karen (aka Edie Sloane) has made me a new jacket. Well, she's made my MacBook Pro a new jacket really. And what a dapper sight it makes. Made-to-measure, its dad-buttonned mackerelbone tweed outer and fern green brushed cotton lining will keep my laptop safe and snug (not to mention handsome) on its journey to and from the studio.

Croix-Rouge

Found in Birmingham. Actually, from France.

Yeah! Fuck you Michael Nyman.

Russell Mills was in town yesterday. He was speaking at the University of Ulster as part of the Ulster Festival of Art and Design. Mills, I suspect he won't mind me saying, is a particularly unfashionable designer. In fact, the tag "designer" hardly fits. Most of the work he showed was more "art", although has often been deployed in a design context, CD and book covers, for example. He's also a musician. Mills is not for everyone but he is for himself. And if there's one thing I admired about him it was a not-up-his-own-arse approach to his super-self-indulgent work. I don't like his work, to be honest, but that doesn't matter. He was interesting. Here are my notes…

My Notes:

The importance of sheds, in relation to Barnes-Wallace and the bouncing bomb.

Sirens.

Hairdresser that made starlight.

The up-their-own-arseness of art.

Schwitters.

Generative Japanese oily wall.

David Sylvian.

Crying fish homage to Benny Hill.

Pissed punk printer hijacks Pentagram artwork.

Porno playing cards.

Sensible sandels.

Cycling in the countryside.

Sheep and three voices.

LA for dinner on Thursday.

Blood, my blood, insects.

Obliged to live in catacombs.

The Christians saying, "Fuck You", to the Romans.

Iceberg off East Anglia.

Punctuated by gunshots.

Barking like a dog.

[At this point we were interupted by a woman choking and I subsequently lost my pen lid. Which disturbed me.]

Micre.

Wisdom and knowledge.

Stained glass, PVA and peat.

12 inch IBM hard disk.

Foot and mouth sheep with human head x-ray.

Pages turning into flapping wings.

The fossel of a shed.

Biblical air plant.

[At this point we were interupted by the choking woman's friend who had eventually decided to see if her friend was OK. I found my pen lid.]

Fuck you Michael Nyman.

White egg cosmic spade.

The Land Is Made From Many Small Parts

The funny thing about the work of Nigel Peake is that I really didn't like it. I was given his book of drawings and paintings, Strøm, a little while back but it didn't do a thing for me. I didn't like his colours, I thought his subject matter was dull and the whole thing seemed pointless.

But then his other book arrived, In The Wilds. And I felt it would only be fair to give it some time. I've done this before. Judged books by their covers only to realise much, much later that I've missed something important. That's the thing about weird stuff that you don't immediately like. You need to give it some time. It's like people, some you like immediately, some you have to get to know.

Peake's work, I feel, you have to get to know. Spend some quality time together. Take it out for coffee. I did that. And what I found was an obsessive nature and love of the everyday, not unlike my own; a fanatical devotion to his lines; and a view of the world not like any other's. The longer I spent with the book the more my admiration grew.

I now love the work of Nigel Peake.