uh oh

lock up your bookish daughters - DBC Pierre is reading at the ever wonderful book slam this month. if it's anything like the last time i saw him read there, expect a swarm of girls crawling over him like angry bees, fighting for the dubious privilege of buying his many whiskies, while DBC takes it like a premiership league footballer at a strip club. odd. but kind of hard not to be riveted.

listen to him on his best behaviour being interviewed by my brilliant (in all senses that word may be taken) friend martin makenzie-murrayhere.

sometimes i wish

"Sometimes I wish I had a job where I could be quiet, maybe as a jeweler cutting stones. But if poets don’t pass on the enthusiasm for poetry, who will?"

from Bookslut's too-short interview with the brilliant rae armantrout.

make yourself happy

this year, my only resolution is to take responsibility for my own happiness. eek.

may 2010 be a colourful year-


...admiring it


...eating it


...wearing it


...and feeling it.



let's make something good.

x

in six weeks' time

for elena and nic, and for kate and david, for being brave.

You are the known way leading always to the unknown,
and you are the known place to which the unknown is always
leading me back.

from wendell berry's 'the country of marriage'.

home (?)

checking flight prices this morning for my upcoming trip back to my hometown, perth, i checked my rss feeds and saw that facehunter has just been through.






that scorched blue sky and bleached, scrubby landscape makes my heart ache with longing.

the sight of amplifier bar, rosie o'grady's (where i once had my drink spiked), and 'beware snakes' signs do not.

it gets less and less like home every time i go back but somehow that strange outpost with its back to the desert will always be in my marrow.

a series of small cheers

let's hear it for wooden soldiers!
i want this little parade of wooden soldiers an unreasonable amount.

let's hear it for mat bickley!
anyone who can carry off a corduroy blazer while swearing like a sailor on shore leave, do his own dentistry, discuss miranda july and then send you on your way with a massive bearhug is a-ok with me. he's like a gold-toothed, foul-mouthed bill ackroyd circa 1986. also, his blog is marvellously weird.

let's hear it for throaty colds!
i can momentarily sing brian jonestown massacre's anenome roughly in the same key as mara keagle.


let's hear it for obsessive consumption!
the art project by kate bingaman-burt, not the pasttime. although lord knows i've done enough of the latter of late...you'd forgive me if you could see the cobalt blue skirt of wonder, though. ANYWAY. the obsessive consumption project documents the artist's personal daily purchases - and credit card statements - illustratively. must really turn the brief sting of a rash purchase into a slow ache. act in haste, repent at leisure, etc.

i'd consider giving it a go if it didn't make me apoplectic just to think about. i can't work out whether i'd be more self-conscious about my extravagances (another bottle of red! taxi!) or my scrimping (another tin of beans for lunch. 3 for £9 pants.).

binge. purge. repeat.

hoarding your goodness doesn't make you richer

Every morning I scramble to cram myself onto a crowded train full of already armoured commuters. Everyone’s staking their claim, chafing against the day, ready for a confrontation. It’s a bloody ego battle played out in hot looks and hair flicks. Who slams into you when the train judders, who’s going to be first off when the doors slide back – suddenly becomes this crucial measure of who’s best, or more important, or – something. I don’t know. Do any of us know?

I do it too, every morning. But I’ve been thinking about opportunities to be kind. This morning I decided to let everyone off ahead of me. I smiled. I gestured for them to move first. Even those people who met my gaze (Londoners are conscientious objectors to eye contact) looked at me suspiciously. But one lady looked surprised, and smiled widely at me, and said thank you, and she meant it. We gave each other the opportunity to be kind, and I felt a bit less of an army of me by the time I stepped onto the platform.

Maybe I’ll forget tomorrow, or be crabby, or late. But days are just ordinary moments strung together like beads on a string, and I want my fingers to hover longer over the sweet options. If you’ve got it, give it away.

image above from masaaki miyara via flickr.

anything with a hot air balloon in it generally pleases me

sweet video for a sweet song. what's really lovely is that it's a fan video - it's not even the official one. how much proof do i need that if you want to make something, you ought to just get the fuck in there and make it...?

Two Weeks - Grizzly Bear from Gabe Askew on Vimeo.

in the in-between

Originally uploaded by rubydoomsday

like joan didion writes, when i find myself in choppy waters, i 'go to the literature'. writers are the ones i hope understand the world better than me, or at least there is comfort found in their tales of the journey back from the dark edges. this is the power of stories. keep turning the page. you'll see.

when i was at university i swallowed books of poetry whole. most of it passed through me or maybe into me, i'm not sure which. one poem in particular has driven me mad since i read it ten (ten!) years ago - i could only remember a few of the lines, and searching for it in books or online yielded nothing.

yesterday in frustration i googled the poet, alan riach, and found an email address for him. i explained that his poem was important and asked him to please tell me where i could find it. he emailed me back less than two hours later to tell me that it had only ever been published in a magazine but he'd do his best to find it.

this morning it was waiting in my inbox. wowsers.

i hope he won't mind me publishing it here. i think it should be in the world.

Crepusculario

In darkness how they haunt us, these shadows of a past we know –
a past we always know we’re on the point of superseding –
always in the moment of the dawn’s anticipation, letting go
of an evening spent before this sun had risen.

May all the hauntings be of favoured memories of real things
Not things you’d wish forgotten or that never should have happened.

Let them linger in their traces as they go. Let them lead to this.


- Alan Riach

dark days and starry nights

I’ve always made a racket. It’s not because I’m extroverted – I’m never really sure whether I'll be silver-tongued or blushing and trembling – I’ve just always been noisy. I tend to talk too loud, and my laugh escapes in involuntarily noisy bursts. I’m embarrassingly clumsy, too, bumbling into and dropping things, and I grew up being told that I went at things ‘like a bull in a china shop’.

This last weekend, in fact, my dad took me and my sister to our old butcher’s shop, where he christened me “that noisy ommer” (Lancashire for ‘noisy hammer’).

I’ve also been told by people closest to me that they know something’s up when I go quiet.

So I apologise for being a bit mute here, lately. There are a lot of things roiling and churning in my heart and my head that have drowned out any other thoughts worth sending out into the world.

In the meantime (and it’s always the meantime), I’m heeding Robert Rauschenberg:

“John Cage said that fear in life is the fear of change. If I may add to that: nothing can avoid changing. It’s the only thing you can count on. Because life doesn’t have any other possibility, everyone can be measured by his adaptability to change.“

So. Enough of that.

There’s a meteor shower tonight. I’m going to be sitting on a rooftop with a great friend eating noodles and drinking wine, eyes peeled. I’m even going to download some of the National Trust’s wonderful stargazing guides. I might even try to learn my three constellations...

Here’s to starry nights.

reduction

walking to meet a friend for lunch today, i noticed that the smeary windows of a defunct dim sum joint looked different.


at first i thought they'd been drawn on, but actually, they were creating pictures by rubbing off the cruddy whitewash that had been slapped up to mask the goings-on inside.

instead of layering things up, it was taking away that made this so lovely.


i stopped to chat to the guy as he worked. i thanked him for making this ugly corner a bit prettier, and he told me that tomorrow night they're opening a new bar-restaurant-art space there.

take away the depressing dim sum place and you've got a new space full of potential. rub away some paint to make a new picture. reduce and have more.


i like it.

30 before 30

it’s coming…and I want to be ready for it. I want to celebrate the last few months of my twenties, and relish this summer, these days, my friends, my lovely (and Sydney-bound) sister. i want to milk this.

So, here’s my list of 30 things to indulge in before I turn 30. (Some of them may be slightly familiar…)

1. Swim in the Hampstead Heath ponds.
2. Write every day for a month.
3. Host a tea party.
4. Finish reading Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit.
5. Take a self-portrait every day for a month.
6. Train for, and run, a half-marathon.
7. See the Wellcome Collection.
8. Purge my wardrobe.
9. Buy a saucily old-fashioned one-piece.
10. Bob about in the Strait of Gibraltar.
11. Watch the sun go down from a hammock.
12. Make chutney.
13. Photograph light drawings with sparklers.
14. Camp near the sea.
15. Eat razor clams in Whitstable.
16. Cook something involving samphire.
17. Celebrate something at Moro.
18. Stay up all night dancing with the best girls in the world.
19. Roll down a hill with Kate.
20. Memorise a Walt Whitman poem.
21. Plant flowers in my window boxes.
22. Sign up for an oral history course.
23. Get a British driving licence (finally).
24. Eat a really good knickerbocker glory.
25. Set off a firework.
26. Learn to identify three constellations.
27. Get my bike fixed.
28. Make the best ever lemon tart.
29. Make dioramas with Rach.
30. Decide what to actually do to celebrate my thirtieth.

wish me luck. also, if you have a secret stash of fireworks, would love to take me out for slap-up moroccan, or want to fill out the DVLA’s D1 form on my behalf, please speak up...

i know this much is true

the big quiet

feeling a bit off-colour and sad and generally meh after saying goodbye to my mum and stepdad and little sister until next january. until i get my chin up again, here are three things that are making my wobbly bottom lip turn up at the edges a little bit:

1. this sweet, sweet picture from the obamas' wedding (via people magazine):



2. tommy's beautiful guide to paris:






3. ...and the fact that i get to GO to paris with this mister.

don't forget to get enough sleep. it's very important; trust me on this.

tell the right stories and we live better lives

In four months and eight days I acquire a new age, a new year, and a new decade. I’ll be 30. Until today I felt more or less fine about it: it’s just another numeral flicking over into the next. But today it’s taken on hall of mirrors-style horror, all warped and weird.

Thing is, it’s not really just another year. It’s a big landmark on the roadtrip from here to there, the kind of thing you’d stop the car to have your picture taken beside; a Tropic of Capricorn on the unspooling road north. And while you were there you’d maybe hop back and forth across the line a few times, knowing it’s just a painted line indicating a fairly arbitrary location, but wondering still at all the distance you’d come and all the way still to go.

I thought that by the time I turned 30 I’d be good at something, really good, that I’d be recognised for the Thing, that people would be talking about the Thing and someone would say, ‘Let’s ask Clare, she knows that stuff better than anyone’ and everyone else would nod and feel reassured that the Thing was now in my good hands. I thought I’d have a book with my name on the spine wedged between Ali Smith and something I like a bit less than Ali Smith.

I thought I’d have a house. And a garden that I’d have finally learned how to be patient with and committed to so that it wasn’t a tray of drought-stricken seedlings I never seem to have time to plant out.

I thought I’d have a home, that somewhere would feel like home, that saying, ‘I’m going home now’ would be a place and a meaning and a sweet feeling.

I thought I’d have worked out how to be lovable all the time. That I’d be good at loving all the time, that I’d met somebody who thought I was all the world’s best magic and run down the aisle to marry them.

I thought I’d maybe have babies, bobbing in a bicycle seat behind me as I pedalled along the canal paths.

But I know that this is what I do: worry that there isn’t enough; turn the world into an empty pantry in ration time and me too hungry. I have a tendency to tell myself the wrong stories.

Actually, I have a lot. I have a beautiful, funny-shaped family that looks out for each other and mostly manages to love each other exactly as is, and I understand more and more how rare a gift that is. I am in love, fiercely, and when I let him, I’m loved back. I have a job that pays me enough money to have adventures and fresh food and new shoes. I’ve made a whole new life for myself, by myself. I’ve had cats and best friends and faraway friends and chance meetings that I’ve loved, and loved, and loved.

Lately the pace of things has been too fast, too many things that aren’t the things that make my world juicy, too much muchness, and it’s given me a bit of life-sized car-sickness. Maybe I’ll pull over and watch some clouds instead of pushing on towards that stupid line of latitude, and make up some stories about plans that didn't quite come off and about not having a plan at all.

yeah, what would you know about it, astrobarry?

Photo by inkling

turns out, quite a bit. dammit.

Your days of holding the interpersonal dynamic at a breezy, easygoing, half-an-arm's-length distance are numbered, Libra. It's getting deeper, fuller, more intense and flavorful… and there's really no useful use in trying to defer the inevitable. I was also going to add that this heightening of involvement level (whether in a romantic, professional or other collaborative context) is due to occur whether you like or not, then thought better of it—mainly because I intuit that you will like it, even if this affectionate pull is unconscious (while your conscious mind continues to freak out about all the ramifications). But we all know there's only so long that two people can play a semi-detached game of nicey-nice with each other before it simply has to 'go there'. You know what I mean? As the next few weeks unfold, you will see that this is either the beginning of the end… or, perhaps more precisely, the beginning of the end of the prior initiatory phase and simultaneously the start of something more profound. Do not fear the tangled web you find yourself being woven into. There's an undeniable thrill to knowing that, though you'll soon have much more to lose should things go south, you'll also soon have much more to gain if and when they don't.

argh. astrobarry strikes again.

things i'm learning, over and over again, these days:

- there's nothing to be scared of, except of being cowardly.
- being afraid means you've got something to lose. having something to lose means you've got something at stake. having something at stake is brave, and good.
- strawberries taste exponentially better when the sun's out.
- i am really a very slow learner.

now wait until the sun goes down and light a sparkler. apparently it is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us. weirdos.

341 years

in honour of the appointment, after 341 years, of a female poet laureate, i give you the poet laureate of my heart: sharon olds.

The Abandoned Newborn

When they found you, you were not breathing.
It was ten degrees below freezing, and you were
wrapped only in plastic. They lifted you
up out of the litter basket, as one
lifts a baby out of the crib after nap
and they unswaddled you from the Sloan’s shopping bag.
As far as you were concerned it was all over,
you were feeling nothing, everything had stopped
some time ago,
and they bent over you and forced the short
knife-blade of breath back
down into your chest, over and
over, until you began to feel
the pain of life again. They took you
from silence and darkness right back
through birth, the gasping, the bright lights, they
achieved their miracle: on the second
day of the new year they brought you
back to being a boy whose parents
left him in a garbage can,
and everyone in the Emergency Room
wept to see your very small body
moving again. I saw you on the news,
the discs of the electrocardiogram
blazing like medals on your body, your hair
thick and ruffed as the head of a weed, your
large intelligent forehead dully
glowing in the hospital TV light, your
mouth pushed out as if you are angry, and
something on your upper lip, a
dried glaze from your nose,
and I thought how you are the most American baby,
child of all of us through your very
American parents, and through the two young medics,
Lee Merklin and Frank Jennings,
who brought you around and gave you their names,
forced you to resume the hard
American task you had laid down so young,
and though I see the broken glass on your path, the
shit, the statistics — you will be a man who
wraps his child in plastic and leaves it in the trash — I
see the light too as you saw it
forced a second time in silver ice between your lids, I am
full of joy to see your new face among us,
Lee Frank Merklin Jennings I am
standing here in dumb American praise for your life.

no-one's going to give you permission

i'm loving the NYSAT project in new york at the moment. from Cool Hunting:

Finding it difficult to locate a strip of space free from any advertising, Jordan Seiler of Public Ad Campaign did some research and found many of the billboards around New York City are illegal. To propose an alternate use of these city spaces, Seiler organized the New York Street Advertising Takeover, a network of citizens set out to transform the spaces into their own works of art.


aesthetically, there's some really lovely work in there, but what warms my cockles most is the way that we're usually so cowed by the law of ownership and the money changing hands and the simple feeling that public spaces are not OURS. how much time do we lose waiting for an elusive somebody to grant us permission to do something we long to do?


i spend a lot of time waiting for someone to write me a note or issue authorisation to go ahead. but i think i might bunk off.

someone i know: rach

The day that Rach started at the place I used to work, I knew we would be pals. I remember talking to her that first morning in the office’s kitchen as I unloaded the plates from the dishwasher. We were both wearing jeans and trainers; the talk came easily. That night, sitting at the big kitchen table in my borderline-derelict share house, a housemate asked how my day was. I answered happily, ‘I met a girl who’s going to be my friend!’

Rach was different to the other girls who worked there, who were mostly pretty, primped and perky account managers. She swerved between effervescent enthusiasm for obscure kinds of pens and cats and art and baked goods, and moody, solitary disdain. She liked Roots Manuva and Steve Reich. She could draw better than anyone I ever saw. She talked about the full sleeve tattoo she wanted an artist to design for her, about swanky hotels she wanted to stay at, about Sweden in summertime.

We went to New York together and she was sad and distant for much of the time, struggling to be away from the boy she was falling in love with. But the freezing December day we got the Circle Line ferry around Manhattan, she suddenly sparked into fizzing life and drew, with utter ease and certainty, the skyline of the entire island.

For a few years we dated boys who lived together. We saw more of each other than at any other time in our lives. But it was less somehow – both preoccupied, running in different gears.

I left that job; took another. Rach and her boyfriend broke up. She changed jobs, too. We drifted.

I don’t even remember how it was resuscitated – just suddenly, there she was again, and we were eating lunch together, talking about men with beards and hatching plans to make robots out of cardboard and watching John Cusack films and trading pictures of cats with weird expression to shake each other out of the doldrums.

For Christmas, just before I got on the plane to fly home to Australia, we went out to drink martinis and Rach gave me one of the most wonderful presents I’ve ever had. It was a care package, full of everything she thought I’d need for such a long flight – Green & Black’s chocolate, small felt-tips and a colour-paper notebook from Muji, a tiny tube of Chanel face wash, an Iris Murdoch book we’d talked about, an eye mask and earplugs that allowed me to carve out 5 solid hours of sleep in that endless night.

She hates having her photo taken. She teaches herself impossibly difficult programming languages on the computer. She dances better, makes better chocolate cake and wears the best socks of anyone I know. My friend said, after meeting Rach for just a few hours, ‘She can do anything, can’t she? Talented gal.’ He’s right.

I call her Razzamatazz, or sometimes Racquel, or Razzle, but she’s one of the few people in the world whose true name is the one they were given at birth. Rach.

on good things (where good is both worth having, and worth doing.)

Vintage Polaroid film boxes
Originally uploaded by missha

(1.) work, and how it gets that way*
Each day, a new tiny tragedy occurs at work to remind us of the presence of the wolves at the door. When I returned to work from holidays, five desks were suddenly empty. This, of course, was not one of the smaller losses: all good, likeable people, working neither harder nor any less hard than any of the rest of us; people with new mortgages to pay or elderly parents or a broken shower or a dyslexic’s panic about having to rework a CV. This was their loss, and our loss, and each of us shed a skin of confidence. This is real. Oh.

The smaller disappointments creep in quietly, like a new season: a constant shortage of coffee, cheap biscuits, the omission of any talk of the new year bonuses it was posited we’d receive just a couple of months ago, a tension in peoples’ faces when you arrive late or leave on time.

I don’t know when the look began. The look on a project manager or account director’s face when you question the brief, ask a question that’s likely to make the client uncomfortable, wonder aloud whether that’s the best way to do something, or if it’s worth doing at all. It’s the look that says, ‘Please. Just do this. And then we can all get paid.’

But the client isn’t always right, and sometimes we do them a disservice by creating something useless or clunky or half-arsed or ill thought-out. Not asking questions or rocking the boat oftentimes means creating something that’s just not very good. Which means it won’t achieve its aims. Which means it’s a waste of money, a waste of time – and it lays waste to everyone’s enthusiasm for actually making something worth having. In short: wasteful.

People aren’t buying; maybe it makes sense to stop selling them things, for a bit, at least. Maybe this is evolution at work: a chance to strip out all the stuff that isn’t working and change tack – create things that have inherent value, actually add value to peoples’ lives. Things that are simply nice to have, to play with, to cherish.

Maybe that’s the worst of these mundane tragedies: watching that small death each morning as a person switches on their machine and that tiny light turns on, while their own tiny light flicks off.

(2.) computer love
Rach was happy this morning; chirruping about how she’d enjoyed a moment of perfect clarity where she realised that she loved her job. And then immediately began worrying whether that meant anything; whether it mattered when the beautiful things she makes online can’t be touched or held or hung on a wall or folded up and tucked into a wallet.

Which made me wonder: why is it hard to love anything made of pixels and blips with the same force of passion we save for lovely new books or a snuggly scarf or a piece of art? Is it because an essential part of loving something is the potential to own it or have it for ourselves, or the exquisite knowledge that someone could (even though it won't be you)?

(3.) an impossible rescue mission
One of the marvellous things about creating something people really love is that they will help it to survive without you, if need be. Kind of like godchildren – their built-in lovability gives them an insurance policy if some awful fate befalls their parents.

Which seems to be the case with Polaroid. It’s just so damn lovable and weird and idiosyncratic that people refuse to let it die what looked like an inevitable death. But in swoop IMPOSSIBLE, plucking it from the rusty jaws of obsolescence. (Fingers firmly crossed, yes indeed.)

(4.) *henry miller has the last word
“Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.”