tiddely-pom

CHarlie texted me saying Pom is being used in the a Firetrap ad campaign. I looked online and couldn't find any images; but on visiting Leeds yesterday I was overjoyed to see her everywhere.

She "like the main one" in the YesYes jeans publicity for New Look. Here are some images of her. Look out for Pom on buses and bus shelters. There's a bit of Boar Lane in Leeds where you can be looking at her advertising for New Look, then turn 180 and see her in the window of a Toni & Guy, modelling "The Pom" (in the New Look ads, she sports a killa-quiff).

I like beer, which makes sense - it's in my blood.

Right; I've been looking up my BMI and it turns out, believe it or no, that I'm underweight.

I typed in "underweight for a guy" into google images and no images of underweight guys came up. Why? How am I able to see what's wrong if no images of underweight men?

Anyways; I'm going to try and get up to 10 stones (whatever that means), anybody fancy helping me? I'll need food donations, that that sort of thing - think of me as a year round Harvest Festival.

I'm going to go and eat the scales now.

GONE LOOKING FOR SKYHOOKS

COMING SOON TO A WORLD NEAR YOU

"It was the best of times, it was a fat drunk woman having sex with a stranger on a train."

Dear world. The worst thing has just happened.

People say, "that train journey was a nightmare. It was delayed by an hour, incredibly overcrowded and so stuffy." Well, that's nothing. I've had that - but ten times worse. I will be having nightmares about this.

PEOPLE WERE HAVING SEX!

I got on the delayed 22:18 from Leeds and chose a window seat facing forwards. Infront of me was a young guy and infront of him a fat drunk woman. Now she might have been about my age, which could class her as a "girl", but the term "woman" has the gravitas needed for her size. She was big, with a face like a plate that drifted about her shoulders as she leaned over her seat to talk to the guy infront. She was under the impression that Leeds was Dewsbury and she needed to "get off" at Dewsbury. The guy told her that Dewsbury was two stops away as he got off at Morley. She then walked up the carriage and sat near the middle of the train until we arrived into Batley, where she came back to her original seat, two places infront of me, accompanied by a young black guy with a white baseball hat and a reflective vest. She sat at the window and he the isle.

My attention was drawn away from them as I looked over my new Leeds Monopoly, purchased today. After reading the back of the unopened box I glanced at the two in the reflection of the mirror. What I saw confused me, upset me and then repulsed me. It looked at first as though she was trying to move past him, to get out into the isle, which would have made sense. Dewsbury was the next stop, where she was supposed to get off. But she wasn't moving sideways that much; and then she moaned, not the moan of a cancelled train, but that moan you heteros seem to enjoy doing.

They were having sex.

This woman went out into Leeds and got fucked and was going home getting fucked.

She didn't get off at her stop because she was getting off at her stop.

Blah-blah blah-blah blah-bla; blah-blah blah-blah-blah blah.

What's the appeal? To tell your mates you did her in the Morley Tunnel (location joke). To say to them you didn't quite make it into the Mile High Club because the stewardess was "probably a lesbian blud. Nah mate she was rough-isit", but you managed to get into the Three Foot High Club instead. (The Three Foot High Club: sounds more like the sexual conquest of midgets [or children {or midget children}]).

I moved to sit in another carriage, unable to comprehend how I should deal with the situation at hand. I texted Becky and hug my Monopoly. Scary.

"anyone fuck'offy? ha ha har. Fuck'offy

I'll say something crude, then I'll laugh, then I'll say: "Is maturity something you grow into?"

I brought Watchmen on DVD today. There were three different versions to buy. The one I bought has one disk and is just the film. There was also a version with two disk with documentories and the like on, and a third which had a limited edition Rorschach mask. I got the cheapest. But I'd also like to think I got the most mature; yeah, I've got time to watch the extended Lord of the Rings with all the additional videos, but I don't want people to know that, I want it to seem like I'm busy doing other stuff.

needlessly offensive

easy

Philosophy for idiots.

Life is like shopping - you buy stuff.

Life is like sex - other people make it last longer than you want it to.

Life is like the replication of genetic material - it's not like that, it is that. Apologies.

HOMEMADE HOVERCRAFTS FROM THE 60s

I've got over fifty copies of the New Scientist from '62-'63. They're great. Especially a serise of articles that ran imaging what different aspects of life would be like in 1984. The content of the pieces are a bit weightier than just fanciful conjecture, but sometimes the are way off, no more so than the inculsion of the hovercraft as a vital piece of transport.

Now it's easy for me to sit here and make fun of the backward view of that foreign country that is the past. Erm that's it.

End.

Hovercrafts are ace.

the animal adventurers of S.P.A.C.E.

Just finished watching Truckers on YouTube. What? Oh, you don't remember it, surprise, surprise. Here's episode one:


I'm going through all the "Anthropomorphic Super Heroes" list on Wikipedia. I think I deserve this as I have a ridiculously clean and tidy room and I can also class it as research for the upcoming film I'm working on - Righteous Indignation (Bucky O'Hare 2.0). It's only a working title.

On the subject of anthropomorphic super heroes, does anyone remember T-Rex? (not the band, obviously) Anyone? Five brothers who were all short little Tyrannosauruses? Their central seating area become a vortex thing when they put their armor on? No?
Of course you don't remember it, because no one does; why didn't you all play at paying attention when you were children? What was so important that you forgot the TV that you watched.

R B Grange

HUBA

6824

Facebook Time

This may sound far too much like a quiz on facebook, but: "What format of media distribution are you?"

Are you a cassette? Compact Disk? 7 inch? Are you a novel? Poem? Odyssey? A comic, or gratify scrawl, or religious pamphlet, or folk song, or blog, or anthology, or tabloid, or broadsheet, or berliner?

I think I'm an audio-book. It has the same meaning as the work itself, but requires less effort to digest. You can fall asleep if you want and you can see how long it'll take.

I've been listening to Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great again on YouTube. Book are too heavy.

Audio-book.

RBG

Al Pacino Poem

"Cops are robbers",

tic-tac-toe
is naughts and crosses
-
according to Al Pacino;
in The Devil's Advocate

Release date: the sixteenth
of January, nineteen-ninety-eight.


R B Grange

BANG!

Just got back from seeing the new Terminator film, Terminator Salvation.

It was a bit of fun, some needless bits, some fun its, and a bit of a dodge script and storyline. But apart from that it was good.

Five stars. That's five stars out of ten stars. Watching it I realised that I really like explosions, that look of the atleast. Now I'm very conserned about global warming and do my best - my carbon footprint is 2.5, that's better than ours, so there; but there is something sublime about those fire balls.

Here are some images from google from the search "explosions". (One google search uses that same amount of energy as boiling the kettle, I include them here so you don't have to waste your time and the earth).





R B Grange

Jesus-is-aware-of-his-fate-but-is-unable-to-do-anything-about-it-as-he-rides-past-on-a-dinosaur.

Here is a bad piece of writing by a bad man:

Jesus-is-aware-of-his-fate-but-is-unable-to-do-anything-about-it-as-he-rides-past-on-a-dinosaur.


I am quite reversed towards defining what it is exactly I do. I make work in a pleasant freefall, picking up and put down differing modes of execution and means of distribution. For the most part, my work, be it drawn, written, sculpted, sung or videoed, is an exploration of the moment when the formal, rigours, conceptual system breaks down and becomes the ridiculous and tragic.

The encounter between perceived truths of the past and the facts of the present greatly interests me. I place myself in a bizarre battleground, where Jesus Christ rides an Apatosaurus with improbable neck muscles and everything is degraded in huge pixels for clarity.

Figures of the once great and fierce beasts, the Dromaeosauridae family (Raptors), sit awkwardly in my pieces, becoming sprawls on the wall and floor. Their limbs, still clawed and sharp, have no use, unable to hunt or support their own weight. It would seem that these monsters have been cloned 65 million years after they died; but something has gone wrong in the lab and their faces are now anonymous. They are pathetic gangly creatures, only partially recognisable, a bastardised cousin of their true ancient form, they are kings brought down to the level of circus freaks.

This changing of character – the systematic to the playful, the empowered to the trapped, the comedic to the tragic, comes from the “…what a piece of work is a man.” speech in Hamlet. The prince describes wonderfully how beautiful and poetic the earth, sky and human race are, only to say that he has no love of them. This quote is used through pop-culture, but finds its most important placement in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Hide and Q; where Captain Picard remarks on the speech:

“…what hamlet may say with irony, I say with conviction.”

The idea that something that is said in irony can be taken at face value, even when the initial context is known, still amazes me. I marvel at this audacity, and hope that it finds its way into the execution of my work.

My understanding of role of the viewer also has a quaint dualism. I feel inclined to give hints to there being something more than the formal aspects of my work (this being most visible in the A3 and A4 SHAP, where print-offs are used to create a fractured narrative), but at the same time I envy the viewer for being able to see my work with a pluralism that I shall never have as its creator. My work, therefore, embraces images, such as architectural forms, but gives little or no clue to how these are to be understood. Are these buildings in the making, or deserted ruins? I give the viewer a god’s-eye-view, but compromise their position; they are able survey every intimate detail of the scape, but are unable to grasp the narrative that created it (I suppose I cast the viewer as an omniscient god in a universe without history, where everything is known to them, and yet they are unable to state an origin, or are baffled by what will happen next. Like an all-powerful Cassandra. Tragic, really).


R B Grange.

Dire Straights

“streets like a jungle, so call the police”

- hello which service do you require -

Police please

- this is the police -

Great.

You want the fire service, don’t you; the police wont be able to help in the jungle – firemen have got ladders and axes. Don’t call the police.

Blur have reformed. My dad always used to say “a reformed band is like reformed meat – it tastes bad, but you can easily put it in sandwiches”. I don’t know what he meant by that, but he always said it, always. It was like his catchphrase.

“streets like a jungle, so call the police, following the herd, down to Greece…”.

If you’re straight and you’re reading this, you don’t know how easy you’ve got it. "Wooh, yeah, our sexuality has never been demonized, wooh, the victorians loved us." Straight people, straights, have got it easy. There are more offensive terms for straights – breeders being my favourite, “You breeder, you fucking breeder”.

Yeah, easy - if a straight guy wants to find a “mate” - I say mate because that’s what straights do – mate. If a straight guy wants to fine a mate all he need do is go to a place where there are people. Even if there are only ten people in this chosen place, the law of averages dictates that approximately 5+ of them will be straight women; easy, throw himself into a crowd and he’s half way there.

The next stage for getting a mate requires more effort, but not much more; he must first demonstrate that he is youthful, and then exert his masculinity. The youthful part will manifest itself as “saying stupid things”. If a guy says stupid things to a girl she’ll find it endearing – “aw, he’s such a lad, talking about nonsense”.

The exertion of masculinity can be one of two things – farting or lifting objects. Farting, and laughing about farting, shows that a male is all man, for some reason, and lifting things is an obvious demonstration of strength. The battle is won. A woman who has seen a man lifting stuff into, er… somewhere, might think “I know he likes me, but is he just being polite… no, that fart secures it, I’m going home with him. Yes that inane banter, farting and lifting make me think that he’ll be good at putting his penis inside me for quarter of an hour”. Is it quarter of an hour? Heterosexual sex? Fifteen minutes? Quarter of an hour? I don’t know.

The above method of courtship does have its draw backs; many a woman has mistake a greater ape’s natural behaviour for flirtation – with hilarious consequences, and the origin of HIV.

But fair play to heterosexual men. And gay women. They are braver men, and er, men, than I.

I saw a documentary called The Perfect Vagina. Ooo, no. No no no. No, not for me. They showed one image and I was scared. It looked, no offence to women, who are of course “part vagina”, but it looked like a reject 50s B-movie monster.

“Now Showing – Attack of the 50ft Woman – with the supporting feature –
Revenge of the 6ft Vagina, see it bleed, but not die.”

Straight women don’t really have to do anything to be found sexually attractive by men. Being stationary seems to be enough. A guy things to himself “Wow, she hasn’t run away from me, I’m in here”

R B Grange

I don't want to be mean to straight people; that's not what I want to do.

Right, so, I don't want to be mean to straight people. At lot of my friends are straights, there's nothing wrong with it, or at least nothing inherently wrong with it.

But it's a bit easy. Granted straight people have their ups and downs, and there is unrequited love in every part of their community, but they've got it easy, so easy. They don't need to go to designated places to meet, everyone presumes correctly about their sexuality, stating it as being "the norm" and jealousy only occurs as a singularity.
When a straight man sees another man going out with an attractive woman, he thinks: "he's done well". When a straight woman sees another woman going out with an attractive man, she thinks: "she's done well". They see half the picture.

What I'm saying is this: the attractive one from The Saturdays and the attractive one from McFly are going out. Oh the unquiet'd rage I have for their happiness, a match made in pop heaven that I am forced to view from Hades. "It's nice that your sexuality doesn't discriminate on the grounds sex"; is it? Is it nice?

Granted, I never had a chance with either Dougie or Frankie, but that's not the point. It's not the point.

RBG

Yeah, I found this info on The Saturday's forum on their website. What's up with that? Don't judge me, you mammals.

"...nothing but the rain."

Been watching bits of BSG at the UN



I think it's an appropriate time for me to start putting bits of my Dissertation online, so here's the bit about Star Trek: The Next Generation and Battlestar Galactica.

GROUPS

2001 and the Alien franchise depict deep-space as a context where the Overman may be attained, but Battlestar Galactica (BSG) and Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) also give us an analysis of the Nietzschean ideal by in stark contrast to each other and the aforementioned texts.

After the attack on BSG’s Twelve Colonies it is estimated that there are 47,973 survivors. This statistic is vitally important to understanding the whole premise of BSG and how the actions of the individual are the crux of the show. This number is not representative of humanity, it is humanity. These are the human race entire.

BSG can be seen as an alternative depiction of the present. Granted their technology is more advanced in creating robots and faster-than-light travel, but the characters still react to situations as we would now, their zeitgeist is our spirit. For clarity of what this means let us place it along side a similar reimagined series, Star Trek; The Next Generation. To a layman the two series may seem similar; “people in spaceships”, but in BSG the characters are forced into space after their homes have been destroyed. Next Generation has a much more pleasant back-story. After making first contact with alien life hundreds of years before, the world is now a utopian society; no wars, no religion, no money, people “invest in themselves”. The people of TNG are not us, they have got past the hang-ups of our time and explore space with a moral high-ground. It is often mentioned to other races, like the Ferengi, that “we were once like you”, in there love of making a profit. In BSG there is money, the black market, a seemingly stringent class system stemming from place of birth, terrorism, insurgency, civil war and election rigging. Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise is an Overman, he makes a great hero, but his character is to be aspired for. Admiral William Adama of the Battlestar Galactica lies to his crew and plots to assassinate a superior officer, and yet he is more or less taken to be a good-guy.

By placing the human race outside of its usual context but keeping the ‘old ways’, as it were, Ronald D. Moore (BSG’s creator) creates a platform for reassessing how we behave, what our drive is, and whether or not we are right to presume we are right. BSG does not come up with answers. One does not learn a lesson by the end of an episode, but instead is left with choices and decisions that are to be made.

I include these two shows to illustrate how two similar conceits for television programmes can vastly differ from each other when one set of characters have gone through this Nietzschean transition, and the other have not. It is what makes TNG a utopian life-affirming story and, by the same token, makes BSG a very depressing watch. The characters in BSG are the entirety of the human race, and therefore cannot use deep-space as an empty context, they merely bring their follies with them. With the narrative taking place in enclosed ships characters are forced into such close proximity to each other than the idea of the self is lost and subverted. The crew of the Enterprise do not need to sleep in barracks or suffer from sleep deprivation because they have already surpassed themselves.


R B Grange

If Shakespeare were alive today...

If Shakespeare were alive today ... he'd be old. Really old.

He'd probably be more famous for being "that old guy" than for writing Hamlet, King Lear and MacBeth; but that's ok, because he's not alive today. Like most people ever - he's dead.

More on this subject can soon be found on my youtube.

R B Grange

yeah!

yeah, so.

R B Grange

donkey dressed as a lion, dressed as a raptor.

I'm halfway through reading The Last Battle. It's brilliant. For anyone considering whether are not they should read the stuff they had read to them, or they themselves read in their childhood, the answer is you should.



Now, I know this image may be a bit "jesus rides past on a dinosaur", but I like it. Donkey dressed as a lion.

The three characters: Puzzle, Aslan and Tash, they're great. The word made flesh in the last of the Chronicles of Narnia shows how dangerous the power of belief can be, especially when belief dabbles in evidence.

I've been thinking about the idea of faith recently. If someone believes that having a "strong faith" is a good thing, then that person would respect people who have the craziest ideas about the world. The more faith you have, the else evidence you need to accept something as true. So someone with the strongest faith would disregard all objective and subjective evidence.
When a god was on the rocks 2000 years ago he sent some evidence of his existence - a man who spoke and came back from the dead. He told people to have faith, but the his followers at the time didn't need any, they knew he was real. It was for that god to survive into the future that he left a message of faith.

"Yes I'm real. But I'm not going to be about for a bit. So you've got your evidence, in me being here, but I'm off now. I was here, but I won't be back for, erm, like ages. So if you think: wait a minute, where's God? Just remember, you don't need evidence to know that I'm real. But if you do need evidence - I am real, and I was here just a moment ago. Ok. Bye"

The person with the most faith does not need to open their eyes.

R B Grange

"Upon this blasted heath"

Sterile Promontory: GOSLIN. (2009)

R B Grange

If in doubt; work it out.

Suck in a rut? Make something. It's taken me four years of my life to learn this.

R B Grange

Cheg on Fantasy, you am a twot.

Below is part of the new introduction to my writing on Nietzsche in Deep Space.

But why deep space? Why Sci-fi? What characteristics does this genre have that it might allow us such an insight into philosophical and moral questions?

For starters the genre has only been around for a hundred years, having its birth in the H G Wells novel The Time Machine. This story has since been the prototype for the majority of Science Fiction; with the main character, usually a scientist, making a discovery or invention, which places him in a position where he must react to new surroundings, a new context. Into this new context he takes facets of life from his own context (or we do as an onlooker), making moral decision, that might seem straight forward to us in our context, into questions of the initial context itself.

In relation to Marxist theory, Sci-fi directly examines the idea of power and how it is distributed. To understand this better let us look at how a ‘sister’ genre of sci-fi, that of Fantasy, deals with the struggle of and for power.

The power in Sci-fi comes from the new discovery or invention. This may be the observing of extra-terrestrial life, the finding of mutant leeches or the discovery of a world beneath our feet. It may be the making of faster-than-light travel, artificial intelligent, or the cloning of dinosaurs. In all these cases the power involved in quantifiable – it is a known entity, even if how we might react to its existence is unknown, the power is understood.

Fantasy, on the other hand, deals with powers that are unquantifiable, and, I might add, revels in this mysticism. It deals with gods and devils and magic rings, that, we are told, are things not to be dabbled with. Granted, it is a metaphor, but it places limitations on the human, and what we are able to endeavor to do. Fantasy says outright that the most powerful things in existence are beyond us, or are only attainable by loosing oneself in an already known predestined ritual. Science Fiction deals with the unknown situation of gained power and where that might place us. It does not deal with an unknown power, but an unknown context.

Shaa

R B Grange

"Have you been sick?"

Had the feed back from my review today.

JT told me that I need to make my work "the time for talking is passed".

I do need to do this, and therefore I shall. I've planned to make six of my A1 drawings and two raptor pelvis things. This is exciting.

The wedding went excellently and I look now, hopefully, have the job of co-editing the video.
Things are good.

R B Grange

It doesn't mean anything; but it makes me feel better.

R B Grange (from Google)

"Every child has the right to be a child"

I've just been watching Lazy Town. Yeah, alright, calm down. It was the episode Little Sporticus, where Sporticus gets turned into a child, for some reason. There is a character called Pixel, who appears in every episode, he's (I think it's a he) the computer one. Anyways, on one of Pixel's many screens was the net of a Tesseract, I was well impressed.
The idea of an aspirational shape is one that my practice keeps returning to. My interest in minimal and Post-minimal practices and images resurges on a seasonal basis.


R B Grange

I want to make subtle things

R B Grange