Van Gogh Trump

I realize that aspects of this are tedious but I'm easily amused. Anything you can upload and distort has my approval. Here's a Van Gogh generated Trump 4th of July address from behind the bullet proof shield. I imagine Vincent, had he ever been called upon to capture Trump might have included even angrier strokes to execute this and so capture the mean and childish spirit that haunts this crazed and dangerous human body. It's just as well that the parallel universe where Trump and Vincent might encounter each other has so far neither been discovered or explored (as far as I know).

Below: Watching a Trump performance on acid. Probably not a good idea.

Stranger obessions

We'll all be old when it finally happens, except for those of us who are younger.

Strange obsessions with Nico abound. Today it's all about her lost (?) years as a vagrant artist and heroin addict in Manchester. There are plays and celebrations. Odd. Chasing a hearse for a better story, a few one liners and some "insight". Not really all that interesting but what do I know. The Guardian is celebrating, maybe it's time to dismantle the false gods of rock and pop culture, audiences are confused. Brian Jones has been dead for fifty years and two days. His daughter still says it was murder. He was a gifted individual. I'm also aware that by reading the stories and recording this here I'm a small part of the problem. We need to invent some new people (if only I could develop this). 

Meanwhile Stuart Adamson's music lives on but the same questions and contradictions never go away or ever end. I remember how enthusiastic he was when he got his Mini Cooper (first gen.) and how his wife got the XJ12. Watching football at Pitreavie  playing fields in the rain. Proper Fife misery, of the tolerable kind. His music still gets played on rare occasions but pundits regularly miss the point. They talk about bagpipes and tartan as if that shit mattered. We need to invent new people and get some new people to celebrate and write about them.

Piano filters

Pianos on mescaline: Keeping up with yesterday's theme and of course just flogging the last few ounces of life from these photos because I can. This is not art. Art is getting up a 2am and filming tadpoles, slugs and newts in your suburban garden pond using blinding lights and a shaky camera. Cut it up into 15 second segments and your audience will go crazy. Many will view this content live (clearly they don't have or can't afford ponds) and will provide much positive reinforcement via likes and comments. I lack this kind of perseverance and vision. Meanwhile I was trying to save a bee but failed, the old sugar/water trick didn't work. It was unfilmed in broad daylight and the dignity of the bee was preserved. Whoever thought bees might have health issues that couldn't be fixed by this simple remedy. How complex are bees?

Painoforte

The placing of pianos in common spaces has become commonplace. It's a thing. Crowds gather and applaud as some tortured and misunderstood genius plays Rhapsody in Blue or Your Song at a railway station or covered shopping mall. Then they all go off and about their business with hardly a care in the world. It's so ... atmospheric and not as uncouth as busking or as some would have it begging with a saxophone. For this piano however that glorious experience is now unlikely, it sits on a brown field waste land, exposed to the elephants and at the mercy of crows and seagulls.  This is a city centre jungle. There are no passers by or willing listeners. It's a slow death. Plink ... plonk.

Last Post of June

A sad state of affairs, there are no home socks, only away socks are available today. Terrible news.

Nice, neat embroidery making a comment that's fit for our times. May the blue bird of happiness etc. etc. 

Something disturbing

Touched by the hand of Vlad: two warmly indifferent robotic psychos rub against each other and any kind of human sparks fail to fly. 

A fine day at the G20: Yes there's something disturbing about these two robotic waxworks, photographed at a gathering of other robotic waxworks (I await proof and a suitably lurid non-fictional reveal). How leaders ever come to be leaders intrigues me, why they choose that path, how they'll twist and turn in their beliefs, how  they'll manicure the truth and massage the facts, how they'll ignore discomforting issues or spin success and bask in reflected credit, how they'll corrupt and how they'll lie. Looking at the wider world these elite specimens seem to be more lizard like than human, I can't criticize those crazy observers who see reptiles beneath their pallid skins. All power is tyranny. Crazy is as crazy does.

Alternate Universe

We had to close, something escaped from one of the tubes.

There's always a different version of yesterday anywhere you might look. The past is never in a steady state, it moves constantly. I can't quite put my finger on it.

Alternate Universe or is it alternative universe, perhaps a sham or an illusion or is all just a series of effects painted on and in essence adding nothing to an already bland universe? I'll never quite know. I'm happy to have the scales removed from my eyes but not my eyes removed from the scales. I'll say it again: all good art is just another form of the endless repetition held over in our daily thoughts, and so is the bad stuff.

"Sir, this coffee has hard edges, I'm sure you'll like it."

Empire of the Scum.

Struggle

Thanks to Happy Toast.

There's a truly Titanic struggle going on between truth, lies and the spaces in between but that's nothing new. In the end (?) the best you can hope for is that you've booked your passage on a well run, well navigated ship that's reasonably robust. Of course in life nobody ever knows quite where things may lead them or what unintended consequences might occur.

More Glasgow

Untrue Facts: Glasgow has more coffee shops than both Hong Kong or New York.

Through the old stone archway a hotel can be accessed. Tradesmen use a less glamorous entrance that cannot be found.

Once there was an empire here, a ballroom, a cinema, perhaps an actual empire. Now it has fallen on harder times to the point that it is now in some reverse facing world. (The sign is backwards on both sides).

Interesting building. Run down and occupied by a cheap and glitzy amusement arcade on the ground floor. On the front steps bags of rubbish await collection whilst the seasonally expected rain pours down.

Glasgow umpteenth daily photo

In Glasgow the beauty business can be tough, some succeed, some fail, others simply fade away like cheap sunscreen over fake tan. This is my perfect selfie (I'm invisible).

St Enoch Square: This is some kind of artwork that frankly defies description but it's there. People are taking photographs, clearly puzzled and the rain never stops. Books are piled up on the debris. Social comment? I've no clear idea. Make your own mind up please.

Noodle Bar: Close to Blade Runner territory here. There's food, there's drink, there's no coffee just eastern teas and alcohol. This may well be the future. I cannot easily live there. It takes at least twelve hours for your body to lose the burned garlic. A pleasant kind of torture. No service charge included.

From a distance

National diet, easy to consume: When viewed from a certain distance, many of Scotland's best views resemble a burger. That is of course our national dish, apart from the fact that it's seldom served in or on a dish and as an actual "nation" we still have a way to go. In other news I hear that Jeremy Hunt is visiting Scotland to discuss fishing rights with fisher-folks and also Heathrow's third runway with people who wish to fly. The future is already looking brighter for our wonderful, burger based land. Be of good cheer, our elders, betters, ex-Etonians and ex-scholars from Oxford know exactly what we need i.e. some lower form of wit than this.

Take the blue chair

Another day, another cafe, another bicycle ride. Actually the first bicycle ride in about two years. We're not as green as we pretend to be. Cycling can be painful when you're not used to it. We sail along at about 7mph whilst the Lycra superheroes whiz by in coordinated speedy sweeps, swooping between dogs and errant children, far away into the distance before we can focus on their progress. (The cycle path goes on forever.) That's mainly because we're focusing on a) remaining upright and b) the nearest cafe/watering hole.

Once at the cafe I'm plonked down in the blue chair, it looks particularly attractive but once I'm sitting in it I forget that it's a blue chair, it's just a chair. I lose all awareness of it but remained seated. So does the chair cease to be blue when I'm sitting in it or is it always blue regardless of who is sitting in it? Or am I just forgetful when it comes to trivial things like the colour of chairs? Amazing how the mind works or doesn't.

Happy floats enjoying retirement.

Welsh dresser in a strange land.

Some kind of brutal

Years and years, a tale told on the BBC, set in a futuristic yesterday (there will be an alternative version played out via Question Time or something to redress the balance): The scene where the old granny has a colourful rant directed at her family but meant for everyone. "It's all your fault, you let it happen. When they introduced the automatic tills at the supermarket, you moaned, you didn't like it but you just got on with it and used them. Then there were no cashiers, they were paid off, more jobs gone..."

We moan a little, we grimace, perhaps we lose sleep, perhaps we think we see the point. We have some sympathy for the devil, whatever the form he takes. Business has to succeed (?), that's why they cut costs (staff), it's all for the common good. Maybe not. There's a relentless direction of travel here. A corruption, a subtle knife, an unspoken shift, a rot and a plague and worst of all a dumb and a stubborn self induced blindness. People don't really matter all that much...

Bottles of light

Geometry of Pasta

The shapes of pasta intrigue and amaze some people. Not me but I like the stuff, I just don't worship it or worry how it came to be. In an Italian restaurant yesterday I had a chicken salad, is that somehow sacrilegious or disrespectful? Probably not, as long as you ring up a bill and pay it promptly I guess it's OK, just doesn't feel quite right though.

Sowing the seeds

The ongoing battle to become the next leader of the Conservative Party has finally gotten to me. I cannot take any more "talk radio", any more punditry, views, interviews or predictions. It's not even a general election but it's somehow worse than a general election. I am therefore retiring from this dangerous and tedious audio part of public life and am, for the time being, becoming a musical hermit. This may of course end badly as I disconnect from life with all it's gallows's humour, back stabbing and fakery. I'm not sure I care. Music, whilst obviously a matter of personal taste at least offers a safe place to go when political fireworks are planned and are inevitably firing off in the wrong direction. Just to illustrate my point I'm listening mostly to Tears for Fears and I don't care who knows about it. There. 

Fish plays guitar

Above: A surreal advertisement depicting a fish playing an electric guitar. To the best of my knowledge this has not yet happened in the real world plus it is only a fanciful illustration trying to sell you a guitar. Sometimes people will say things like "life is so surreal" or that some event was "so surreal" or that they felt "surreal" (?). But it wasn't or isn't any of that, perhaps it was strange or unexpected, it jarred with the rest of what was going on or maybe just hard to understand. None of that makes it surreal. Surreal is not real, it is super real and we live in a world of "ordinary" real, "regular" real and far too may unnecessary bits of over use of inverted commas brought about by lack of imagination and of course that old faithful; laziness. 

Return of the insects

Two wasp's nests, a giant spider and a lot of ladybirds: I'm in an optimistic mood, the insects are fighting back, maybe it's the wet weather, maybe it's the mild winter, maybe it's none of above. Perhaps my insect vision has grown and expanded, I'm seeing the world through ladybird coloured glasses, there's no credible explanation. The return and rise of the insects may save us all from Armageddon; the lack of pollination and the death of wild birds. Not noticing too many bees however, not sure when their big season is. The colony in the fields next door have been moved on by their shepherds, pastures new and all that. Anyway I've decided (as per yesterday's rant) on defaulting to optimism as the superior state of mental well being.

Optimism

Asda car park: Somebody who really likes cats or just fails miserably to understand that sometimes words have two meanings.

Back from the brink of Gogglebox: Years and Years, Black Mirror, A Handmaid's Tale etc. Dystopian science fiction is like a drug, a drug that's a bit like heroin in fact. A black drug. A black hole of a drug. Invariably modern dramas in this genre try to scare the pants from us by predicting and portraying future worlds where things become darker, less controllable, more frightening and downright dangerous. There is no comfort, there is no salvation, just a ragged humanity constantly beleaguered by oppressive regimes, alien attack or nature going crazily out of control. It's a ratings winner every time and it does reflect real life but slightly skews it away from the everyday experience. 

So is there now an alternative case for more of a balance where science fiction carries a new and jarringly optimistic tone, where there are actual positive outcomes, where humanity isn't crushed, when we actually work together and manage to prevent doom and destruction falling upon us? In this other storytelling universe things actually work out, the good guys win (and not just the key characters we've been rooting for but everybody), there's a positive outcome. Is there anybody writing this stuff these days? 

I can't say I'd expect this to sell but there has to be a safe adult fictional place outside of kid's TV programming. The constant dramatic bombardment of negative energy, awful outcomes and the bigging up of man's inhumanity to man wins every time. As Steven Hawking once said via his voice machine, "it doesn't have to be this way". Just think about that please, even for a few seconds before cynically dismissing it. Not all coppers, politicians, billionaires or scientists are bent or bonkers.

On reflection the original Star Trek had a more upbeat tone as it grew awkwardly out the 50's wild tales and it was of course cheesy and unbearable at times but it got us all addicted to some higher plan and purpose ... we just didn't realize that the rot was setting in. Now we are not so much what we eat but what we view.

Reckless Eurovision

It's a few weeks since Eurovision but that's hardly important. What is important however is this epic series of snappy renditions from a Eurovision that never was but one that probably should be. I don't quite know how else to put it ... a highly creative piece of mash-up art work?