Baking Made Easy

Here’s me ranting about Kirstie Allsopp and the “Baking Britain” phenomenon for The Harker arts website. And these are my Chelsea Buns! Down with pattiserie porno I say!

Biology Today

These are some incredible scans from a 1972 biology text book called Biology Today, which I’ve reposted from (in my view) the blog of all blogs 50 Watts, an online storehouse museum of bizarre esoterica and kool-aid psychedelia. Dang, if biology textbooks still looked like this, I might have actually paid attention in science class!

Somebody To Love

“All our young lives we search for someone to love. Someone who makes us complete. We choose partners and change partners. We dance to a song of heartbreak and hope… all the while wondering if somewhere, somehow, there’s someone perfect… who might be searching for us.” — The Wonder Years

“The Medium is the Message”

“Hippy is an establishment label for a profound, invisible, underground, evolutionary process. For every visible hippy, barefoot, beflowered, beaded, there are a thousand invisible members of the turned-on underground. Persons whose lives are tuned in to their inner vision, who are dropping out of the TV comedy of American Life” – Timothy Leary, The Politics of Ecstacy.

“Our programme is cultural revolution thorugh a total assault on culture, which makes use of every tool, every energy and every media we can get our collective hands on… our culture, our art, our music, our books, our posters, our clothing, the way our hair grows long, the way we smoke dope and fuck and eat and sleep-it’s all one message-the message is freedom”
-John Sinclair (1969)

“Made up my mind to make a new start. Going to California with an aching in my heart. Someone told me there’s a girl out there/ With love in her eyes and flowers in her hair”.
- Led Zeppelin, “Goin’ To California”

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama in her “Horseplay” happening in Woodstock 1965. Other than a total anarchic mega-babe, and dots obsessive (which she calls “infinity nets”), Kusama was one of the original 60′s art installation artists. As ‘DJ Trouble’ at WFMU says, “Yayoi was one of the original free love, installation mama’s of the 1960’s, using obsessive repetition in ways even Andy Warhol hadn’t dabbled in yet.”

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The 24 hour play

Here’s what I wrote about the yearly Oriel 24 hour play , directed by James Methven, and published in the Cherwell. It was lots of fun!

Photos courtesy of Sophie Duncan, who blogs here.

Dissocia Zine

Work has started on Jay and I’s new zine, Dissocia. Here’s our creative mess, below. Thou must follow us on Facebook, Twitter, the Dissocia blog, and whatever goddamn piece of technology we can master.
Contribute, contribute! We’re looking for prose, poetry, fashion writing, satire, comics, doodles, paintings, photography, one-page plays, jokes, essays, sketches, book reviews, film reviews, rants; write about politics, or art, or sport. And send in your stuff: dissocia @googlemail.com.

Randomly, while flyering around Cowley Road, Rosy and I came across this gem of a wall:

“DISSOCIA, DISSOCIA, WELCOME TO DISSOCIA!”
-Anthony Neilson, ‘The Wonderful World of Dissocia’ (2004)-

Cuban portraits

Here are some photos I took of various people in Havana in 2006.

The above photo is of the Cuban artist Rocio Garcia de la Nuez.

The Post-it

This is one of a series of 71 photographs by Phil Grey of Will Self’s room, viewed in 360 degrees.

For Will Self, the Post-it note is an inherent part of his creative process:

“My books begin life in notebooks, then they move on to Post-it notes, the Post-its go up on the walls of the room. The shaggy patch of them in the middle of the wall (they’re stuck to a map of the Isle of Grain, my spiritual home) are all short story ideas, tropes, metaphors, gags, characters, etc. When I’m working on a book, the Post-its come down off the wall and go into scrapbooks, which is why the wall to the left of the window has Post-it alopecia – that’s where some of The Book of Dave was stuck up. I can’t throw anything away. Anything. I’m going to end up like one of those old weirdos who lives in a network of tunnels burrowed through trash – yet I do not fear this”.

The Post-it is the baby of the inventive genius of Dr. Spencer Silver and Dr. Arthur Fry. In 1968, Silver developed a high-quality but “low-tack” adhesive which consisted of small, indestructible acrylic spheres that stick only when tangent to a surface (such as a wall). As a result, the adhesive’s grip was strong enough to hold papers together but weak enough that the paper can be pulled apart again without being torn.

For the humble student, the Post-it is a visual aid, the condensed germ of an idea or a quotation stuck up on a visible plain. It is a to-do list (“Buy print cartridges”). It is a messaging device, a homing pigeon in note form to leave on other student’s doors (“Ella: dinner tonight? S+ P xx”). It is an easy-to-find notebook for jotting down numbers and messages. It is an empowering fridge magnet in paper form (I know someone who jots down carpe diem style notes on her fridge and changes the message at random). It can also function as a sort of modern day billet-doux, a quick love letter stuck on a lamp, the words I love you. Call me text me when you get this scrawled on neon yellow. It is, in scientific lingo, a retrieval cue, an adhesive aid for absent-mindedness. The point of the Post-it is that it is totally ephemeral. I’ve only ever saved one Post-it in my life and that was a special one. The rest are ripped off walls when the crucial exam or important errand is completed. Will Self sticks them in note-books when he’s done with them as plot-helping devices. The best thing about the Post-it is that it is a small tool for classifying the external disorder around you. Two friends in my halls post-ited every object in their room while drunk one night (“table”, “chair”, “book”, “book”, “book”, “toaster”). The post-it is a stationary object in a rapidly moving world.

A photo of Frank Long, 88, and Shirley Knappe, 83, of Coral Springs, Florida, who were married three years ago and use different types of Post-it notes to organize their lives (Barbara P. Fernandez for The New York Times).

Through the keyhole

What is it about us as human beings that makes us love nosing around people’s houses so much?

Possibly one of my favourite websites around is The Selby, where the photographer Todd Selby takes photos of arty/trendy/it people’s houses, along with mini scrawled interviews and watercolour drawings. Ignoring the latest instalment of the dreaded Peaches Geldof’s new pad in NY, most of the characters have seriously cool, creative houses. My favourite of long ago is of the artist Fanny Bostrom and the photographer Bill Gentle. How lovely is this:

Then there is the Writer’s Rooms series in The Guardian Review. Man, all the rooms look the same, but still, I love that section.

Max Romeo at The Academy, Oxford

Max Romeo’s performance at The Oxford Academy was nothing short of rare. Not only was this  the second time he had played at Oxford, which for a legendary reggae artist like himself was strange enough; he also played ‘Wet Dream” for the first time in 34 years.

‘Wet Dream’, written in ’68, is a pretty explicit song that was very popular in Jamaica, and England, even though it was banned by the BBC ( I wonder how the Ross-Brand fiasco would have fared then?). With lyrics like “Every night mi go to sleep mi have wet dreams/ Lie down gal let me push it up push it up lie down”, I find it hilarious that Max Romeo tried to defend the song as being about a leaking roof!

The performance was really interesting. Some of the songs felt a bit stale,  like he was going through the motions, particularly ‘War Ina Babylon’. But others were electric. His rendition of ‘Give Peace A Chance’ gave me goosebumps; his band asked the entire crowd to make the peace sign with their fingers as Max Romeo talked about the need for peace, how there was too much war, and asked for the blessing of Jah. Having the entire crowd and the band making peace signs, rather than feeling trite, was seriously moving. ‘Chase The Devil’ (his most famous song, sampled by The Prodigy in ’92 into the disco trance song ‘Out Of Space’) was immensely popular. So was ‘Three Blind Mice’ and ‘Wet Dream’.When he finished, the crowd went crazy for an encore, and when he came back to play a ska song, we turned round and the the entire Academy was going crazy!

The reason why I felt some of the songs felt a bit stale was because I could imagine them having at one point real political relevance, whereas now, to a majority-white-middle class audience, they didn’t. This doesn’t make them any less enjoyable or interesting, just less politically relevant.

Romeo’s move to Rastafari in the ’70′s was against a backdrop of civil unrest in Jamaica. You can see this in the lyrics to his songs on the War Ina Babylon LP (1976).

Indictive feelings enter feeling
The truth is a fact, tell me
Are you a con man, or are you a dreadlocks, eh?

His stage performance was mesmerising though. We couldn’t help looking at him the entire time; there was something about his stage persona, about his rare addresses to the crowd, which carried you with him. He was looking pretty sweet for his early sixties!

The performance was held under the club night Skylarkin’ Soundsystem, which puts on dj’s and live performances in Oxford on a Thursday night.  The support act, Raggasaurus, were surprisingly entertaining: check them out. They’re a local band from Cowley Road, who mix Arabic chanting over dub and reggae beats. The sound was brilliant: unusual, really rhythmical, and with a contrasting mix of sounds that just worked.

O yeah, and we got to meet the big man backstage! A member of the band saw us spazzing out in the front row, and asked us if we wanted to meet him. We thought we’d heard him wrong. Max Romeo has a strong handshake!