Δ B L E B E Δ R: August 2010

31 Aug 2010

Carnival

Some photos I took at Notting Hill carnival...

27 Aug 2010

Spiral x200

Just got the Spiral DVD back from the printers. Looks great.

22 Aug 2010

Magritte

If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream.

Above are my favourite paintings by Rene Magritte. I was recently reminded of his work through the research for my dissertation on Existentialism.

21 Aug 2010

I've spent the last few nights at a Premier Inn in Derby. I'd never been to Derby before. The highlight was hitting 728 on the punching machine in the arcade across the road. Another highlight was this window pane of the toilet door in the local pub...

Yeah, I know, fun times.

But the highlight that tops them all was seeing the magician Paul Daniels and his wife Debbie at a garage on the way home. He's just the sort of b-list celebrity that I'd expect to bump into at a grim, nondescript service station.

I wonder if that's his Saturday afternoons... driving around middle England making pointless detours into garages under the pretense of buying wine gums, a paper, a ginsters pie, or anything else that won't make his wife suspect he's actually just looking for an opportunity to be recognized again, to perform impromptu tricks on weary travelers that are utterly thrilled to have bumped into the great Paul Daniels. To have an audience once more.

After seeing them in real life I can now say for sure that he's definitely punching above his weight. Debbie has still got it...

Not sure if Paul ever had it in the first place.

I expect he loves it when he's stopped by strangers and asked if they can take his and Debbie's picture. If my phone had had any battery I'd of asked for a picture too, after all, it's not everyday you bump into a national star.

Except rather than ask to take his picture I would of handed him my phone, put my arm around his wife and said 'make it a good one would you pal'.

I wonder how he'd take it? Probably by making my phone 'magically' disappear, grabbing Debbie by the arm and dragging her to the car muttering something like 'you're not a bloody glamour girl are you? So don't act like one then, you're a magician's assistant, you're my assistant, and you always bloody will be Debbie, always... Now, let's get home, have a nice cuppa and practice that new trick, eh, you can try on that new outfit I brought for you too'.

All in all it was one of the more memorable service station visits. For me at least. Paul Daniels on the other hand, I expect that it was a tad disappointing for him, not at all like the heady days of the early 90's when he had his own T.V show and was being greeted up and down the country like a national hero by hoards of families waving his picture for him to sign, children and adults alike practically begging him to perform a trick.

Instead, he gets me.

I bet every time he pulls off the motor way and into a service station there's always that faint glimmer of hope he'll be asked to perform again. Would stuffing one hundred coloured handkerchiefs up his jacket sleeve that same morning end up being worth it?

Or, like so often before, will it be a complete waste of time and effort that only ever results with him taking it out on his poor wife when they get home? It will be her job to not only bear the brunt of his anger but also to calm him down afterwards by whispering soothing words into his ear and stroking him to sleep. On particularly bad nights I imagine he wakes up in a cold sweat calling for the head of Derren Brown, 'that bastard confidence trickster, bring me his head!'

Actually I feel a bit sorry for Paul Daniels, it must be hard to keep up with the modern magicians like Derren Brown and David Blaine. As the saying goes, you can't teach an old dog new tricks.

I wish I'd said something to him now, instead of awkwardly trying to pretend I didn't know who he was. He knew I knew who he was, he knows that everybody knows who is. He's fucking Paul Daniels. By that reasoning, he also knows I ignored him, I choose not to say 'hey, Paul, love your stuff man, you're great'. I cold shouldered a national hero, possibly the most loved magician this country has ever produced. What was I thinking!? I should be ashamed of myself.

I should be, but I'm not. In fact I quite like the idea that Paul and Debbie were lying in bed having this conversation...

'Debbie, can I ask you something?'

'Of course my darling, what is it?'

'I don't suppose you remember being in the service station earlier?'

'What one love? We went to eight today'.

'Erm, the one near Derby.'

'Yes, I think I remember. What about it?'

'It's just that there was a chap in there and well, he totally ignored me, he just looked straight through me, like, like I was just an ordinary man.'

'Oh, don't you worry about him silly, he knows who you are, he was just too shy to say hello.'

'Do you think so love? I mean do you really think so?'

'Yes my dear. Now close your eyes and go to sleep, it's been a busy day.'

'Okay... Love you.'

'N' night. Love you.'

Kubrick's Ten

This is the list of favourite films that Stanley Kubrick gave to an interviewer in 1963...

1. I Vitteloni (The Young and the Passionate)

2. Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries)

3. Citizen Kane

4. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

5. City Lights

6. Henry V

7. La Notte (The Night)

8. The Bank Dick

9. Roxie Hart

10. Hell's Angles

17 Aug 2010

Camus

There are days when, under the familiar face of a women, we see as a stranger her we had loved months or years ago

Albert Camus' 'The Myth of Sisyphus'

Take 26

The older we get, with each passing year, to say 'oh, this year went so fast', 'it will just be a quiet one this year' or 'it doesn't even feel like it's my birthday' becomes, ever increasingly, a cliche, the thing to say.

Why doesn't it feel like it? Is it simply as selfish a thing as not getting as many presents as we used to when we were children?

Partly I think.

It's increasingly rare that I'm genuinely surprised by a birthday present. Now it's like orchestrating the present giving myself. Being asked what I want has been the bane of recent birthdays, the struggle to think of something that I want and yet something I've not actually wanted enough to buy myself.

Next year I'm going to tell anyone who asks me what they should buy me to just think about me for one minute and make a decision about what they think I want, to ask themselves what do they want me to have. I think that will bring the surprise element back into presents and add a sentimentality that is sometimes lacking.

Ultimately, I never want to receive money in an envelope again. (Unless I'm wearing a pastel blue suit, sitting at a shaded table of a rooftop terrace in Cote d'Azur and am handed a large brown Manilla envelope by a foot runner sent by the Havanan drug cartel).

This probably seems very ungrateful. I'm not ungrateful, I just want birthdays to be less about the material value of a present and more about its meaning. There's just something so impersonal about receiving money in a card.

I understand that since I stopped collecting Thundercats memorabilia its been hard to buy for me. Good news is I've recently put my collectable Star Wars figures into cryonic storage and so have a space on my shelf to begin afresh. Between you and me, I'm more and more interested in the early GI Joe figurines, circa 1984 (hint for next year).

Looking at the above image does make me wish there was something that could get me as pant-shittingly excited as I used to about opening toys.

Aside from presents though, I think there's something else that compels us to underplay birthdays as we get older. And that's simply just the passing of time and not wanting to recognize or fully bring to light the fact that, according to the Roman calendar, we are one year older.

Why do we need to measure our lives like this, crossing out years with each passing birthday. What true significance does it have?

I messed around a fair bit when I was in secondary school. Particularly in chemistry (no pun intended). But the most valuable thing I think I could of learnt in that lesson was just a passing remark said off the cuff by my teacher (as we were leaving the class room I think) and it hit my infantile little mind like a lightning bolt. It's about the only thing I've ever remembered from that class. He said...

time is just a conceptual notion which we use to measure our own existence

For me that line is like poetry. It shatters the illusion of a structured, ordered, manageable universe that man can understand and control. It evokes the idea of measuring time as being a futile and tyrannical thing to do, typical of a species that wages global wars with one another.

I'm not such a purist as to think that we should abandon the idea of time altogether. It's a necessity for farming to have a system of harvest. But that's just seasonal. The natural calendar of seasons.

Our time on the other hand, by that I mean manufactured time, the clock that we live our lives to, is like a dictatorship. It shackles, constrains and imprisons what we call time into little cells of hours, minutes, seconds, split seconds, nano seconds etc.

It makes me wonder if viewing the world like this has had an impact on our own minds. Does the breaking down of time into sections affect the way our minds work? Has the evolution of the human mind been affected, or even, is it being affected by the categorization of time?

Imagine what the impact would be if we removed the clock from our lives. Of course, initially, the world would be in turmoil. Everything would collapse.

But eventually civilization could rebuild itself and humans might be able to live simply, by day and by night, and according to the four seasons, independent of the tyranny of clocks.

Just a thought.

Regarding the birthday presents of childhood again... Although I don't really collect Thunderbirds memorabilia and was merely jesting about wanting to collect GI Joe figures, I do yearn for this object still. Someone in my house threw it away years ago, discarded it like ordinary household trash...