overlap

I did have something to say, I'm sure, but instead I'm about to have my earliest night in quite some time, rest my sore throat and catch up on some much needed shuteye. This post is titled and visually aided for no good reason, other than that I too had duck for xmas, and I'm a sucker for poor puns.

Ok, I'll own up that my days of having a finger on the pulse of any kind of contemporary cultural happening are limited to about three and a half weeks in 1986, but all the same I'm still somewhat surprised.

There is a single being released today that I would ordinarily be about to go and get from one of several record shops in my lunch hour - nice and easy, no problem. Instead I've been forced by the mechanics of the music industry to investigate downloading music as the single is not going to be buyable in any kind of tangible format.

On finding I'd no choice but to get down with the kids, daddio, I started looking at the variety of websites I could get the track from - and note that's track singular, now we've gone from the multi-formatting excesses of the late 1980s to the stark minimalism of nothing but a file stored on a hard drive somewhere, no b-side tracks, no cover art, the ultimate in disposable next-to-nothingness.

I'm no technophobe - I earn my living playing about with computers in various ways after all. And as with most technological developments, there's vast amounts of money to be made and lost, so I probably shouldn't be surprised to find a dozen different websites offering the track with limitations to various kinds of proprietary device or format, and they shouldn't be surprised that I just decided it was way too much flaming trouble.

All the same I refuse to miss out on music made by bands I love, and being no technophobe and having certain tools and equipment at my disposal, I'm confident I'll find a way around the problem. And that's another sale lost. That's the price of progress, I suppose.

Oooh, it's been a busy week, culminating in a twelve hour sleep last night. Over the last few days I've been watching some live acts of arguably major historical importance that I'd never seen before, and I've also renewed my acquaintance with a singer and a band who I first saw in 1988 and 1989 respectively; one I knew I'd missed, one I hadn't expected to enjoy as much as I did. So it's good to find I can still be pleasantly surprised, and that I haven't got so entrenched in my opinions that I can't tell what I'm seeing. On which note, here's evidence of some of what I've not been doing this week. For nobody's benefit in particular, here's the proof of how hair colours can vary in the same patch of skin, and how it's possible for neither of those to be ginger. Not making any particular point, obviously.

Labels: gigs, Little Angels, rock, Thunder, Toby Jepson

Ok, the proof of the pudding being in the printing or something like that. I've just collected the results of the other evening's messing about with the camera. More results are now visible on flickr, but I'm quite pleased with the results of what is always going to be a bit of a gamble. This is the sort of background my photography comes from - it's a pretty straight documentary here's a thing exactly how it looks approach. But this is probably the picture I'm most happy with from this bunch - it looks far more abstract, and feels far more creative due to leaving stuff to chance. Getting this sort of result is a matter of luck, based on the impossibility of guessing how much traffic is coming in the next minute or two. And for this one, the shutter button was held down manually rather than using a cable release, which accounts for a slight wobble in one or two other shots from that view.

I realised I haven't done a long list of what make up I'm wearing type post for some time, and then I figured I could let the pictures do the talking. Above you'll see everything I've used this evening, below you'll see the effect. Including the mascara in 'plum', which turns out quite a bit darker on the lashes than it looks in the tube. Pleasantly surprised with the results, I'd call that.

Labels: make up

Someone asked me about some of the pictures I've been putting on flickr of late, and there's no space there to comment in depth.

At the moment I'm about halfway through my collection of prints, and it's nice to be reminded of a whole heap of stuff I'd either forgotten or which didn't really register with me at the time. So what I'm doing is scanning all the interesting landscape, scenery, skies and similar stuff and loading it up as and when I get the time.

This has a couple of benefits, not least that I'm still inching ever closer to the promised purchase of a digital camera, but also that I'm reminded of the better results I've had in the past, and feeling inspired to get out and take a few more pictures just for the fun of it.

Last night I went to sleep thinking about footbridges or other handy locations for some more light trail pictures - although I have a fairly documentary tendency, the results of the longer exposures are largely unpredictable in a way that straight portraits aren't and if you get the right location, it still takes a bit of patience and a bit of luck and even then you can't quite control the image that you end up with.

Now, where did I put my tripod?

* Evening update: tripod and I spent over an hour beside and above the dual carriageway, and despite the amounts of yellow light spilling out of the street lamps, I'm hopeful for something in the way of reasonable results. Time will tell.

I'm trying to deal with the different aspects of the Burns saga while it's headline news in separate chunks - it's nothing new to be told that I'm not being entirely clear even when I'm trying to be, so I hope that breaking it down may help.

Burns says all the work he's had done is nothing to do with attention, and I can't help feeling there's a little too much protesting going on there. Being in the public eye for something as ephemeral as a couple of pop-disco hits is bound to affect your perspective somehow, and I can't speak for what difference that makes, but I can be pretty sure that you don't get invited to take part in Celebrity Big Brother and accept exclusively for the altruistic ends of helping a charity raise a few quid.

For my part, there's a very old story about how even at nursery school it was noted that I didn't play with other kids, and to a degree that certain enquiries were made about this - my natural inclination is not a social one, it's fair to say. It follows that the spotlight of attention makes me uncomfortable in general, and I'm happy sat in the background until there's something I can contribute. You may recognise something of this in my forum posting style.

Now, if I said that on occasion the make up and the clothes that aren't intended for me all act as a partial buffer between me and attention by making me feel I look more like someone else who can better handle attention, in the same way an actor playing a role knows it's the character the audience are responding to and not the person behind it, I wonder if that makes sense.

Even if it does, I doubt it's the whole story :-)

This is a test post.

But it's also an opportunity to record the fact that I've had my first proper cereal breakfast in I don't know how long, and still been up long enough to put on a little make up already.

It'll never last!

I've been thinking through Pete Burns' current media coverage and what separates the two of us by definition, because it seems to me the TV label is being applied as a handy way of labelling him some sort of freak rather than as a purely descriptive term, especially if you listen to what he says about himself. PB describes the vast amounts of work he has had done on his body as a process that leaves him looking a way he feels happy with full time. If I might compare that to permanently dyeing grey hair to hide the existence of grey hair at all times, my position would equate more to being happy with my own hair but enjoying the variety of wearing a wig in a different style or shade as an occasional alternative to my own. In that regard I have more in common with Grayson Perry's sometime alternative identity as Clare, even if I wouldn't go so far as to claim an alternative name - it's just a different part of me, and significantly less that the whole of me, whereas for Pete Burns there seems to be nothing else.

I'm feeling a bit more like myself this afternoon after a weekend of not going anywhere or doing much. I got twelve hours of sleep on friday night and the same again on saturday night, so I obviously needed it, but what I didn't need was to then be unable to sleep and not get my head down till about 4 on monday morning.

It seems funny to be suffering from feeling too tired after too much sleep, but the amusement wore off pretty rapidly! Today I'm mostly back to what is normal for me, but already looking forward to sunday and not having to get up. And I've a couple of books to read so maybe I can get back into the habit of reading. Not before time.

I was getting some things from the reduced price xmas gift sale of a major high street retailer this lunchtime, not all of which was for me. I've commented before on the is-that-for-you-then-you-freak? look phenomenon with which I sometimes get served, and how it doesn't appear to be age-specific, purchased-item-specific or anything other than simple a matter of which individual's till I end up at. It doesn't really bother me, and I'm used to it now. But I imagine that where blokes may have been buying make up gift items three weeks ago, there probably aren't quite as many taking advantage of 75% price reductions now the shops are trying to shift the stock. And so it would seem that the distraction of that phenomenon contributed to something not being scanned, and therefore being free. Of course I only realised I had paid a little less than the bill I had calculated as I was leaving the shop and had a brief realisation moment of hoping the unscanned item was not still security-tagged and about to set the alarms off, but I wasn't about to go all the way back to the other end of the shop and demand they take another couple of quid off me. Probably the major distraction factor was not so much in the gift boxes, but in that I also picked up a reduced price individual item on impulse. Which is how experiments in plum mascara now await me. And if it turns out to not to be especially suitable for me, at least I'll have the knowledge that just for once the oddness factor of me shopping turned out marginally in my favour.

Now this feels mighty weird, and very much against my normal judgement. They've been dead the better part of thirty years betwen the pair of them but this is (almost) all I have of my grandparents. My guess is my grandfather is mid-50s in this, and I haven't even the foggiest notion about the where and the when of the other picture. Enough already. * On further reflection, the wierdness factor is probably the way that this is all part of something that's no more part of my daily life than the historical fact that there was a bit of a fight in 1066, or that some people got on a boat in 1492. And yet at the same time, in one of these pictures I see something of my own inescapable future, no matter how much moisturiser I bury myself under.

I did have it in mind to post about something else entirely, but after following a bunch of people frothing at the keyboard about various aspects of the story, I feel compelled to say my piece. A couple of weeks ago I was talking about being hit by a car when on my bike, and I'll own up to road safety issues relating to cycling and driving being a particular soapbox story of mine. This morning, this happened. Someone in a car killed four people on bikes. And by way of summary; According to police, its back wheels slipped out as a group of 12 from Rhyl Cycling Club was coming in the other direction. The car crashed through them, into the stone wall at the side of the road, before careering back on to the left-hand carriageway. It knocked at least two cyclists clear over the wall. As police closed the road and began their investigation two blankets covered their bodies many metres inside the field on the other side. That's not a casual freak accident, no matter how you look at it. People appear hugely divided in reactions varying from quiet contemplation to robust condemnations of the leading statements offered by the police which appear to suggest that this driver was 'doing nothing wrong', and the inaccurate reporting that 'cyclists were in collision with a car'. Whatever gets you through the night, it's still a notionally free world. I do my best to ride safely and my record's pretty good, but all I can say is no amount of crying is going to bring me back, and in the statistically realistic event something like that does come my way, anybody using me to make political capital to campaign for any change that makes the roads safer would have my explicit blessing to do so.

Hmm, this is a tricky one. The article that the title links to is an edited extract from Wendy Jones' forthcoming book on Grayson Perry, as featured in the Guardian today. There's plenty of personal detail as would be expected from a life story, and a certain amount of generalisation about the nature of TV-ism. Naturally enough, I read the generalised elements and I respond by vague recognition or more frequently think 'not me!' - so now I'm trying to pick my way through the conflict caused by this. On the one hand, it's fair to suggest that beyond Izzard there is a lack of role models or wider public examples to further the idea that it's more a less mainstream branch of 'normality' than some kind of extreme freak zone - it is after all a popular enough standard deviation. And on the other hand there's a part of me that would prefer not to have the broad brush of Perry says so it must also be true of... applied to me, especially when that would be hugely misleading. Then again, if I don't share my own thoughts and experiences, perhaps I can't really complain if someone else does so with theirs. I have a pretty good handle on what bits come from where in my own development, which is good enough for me, but then there's no money to be made from my story in the way there is with that of a prize-winning artist! Over the last couple of years, my attitude towards disclosure has been shifting most of the time, and I'm pretty comfortable these days, so I guess the question is exactly where should I start.

It would appear that today is the first anniversary of this blog, that was quick!

I've had a couple of pleasant surprises in recent days, including an email out of the blue from someone I used to know who saw a news story and (correctly) guessed that I might have been involved, and I've come up with a couple of intriguing plans for the next year or two, so everything's looking pretty interesting.

Nothing lasts forever and I appreciate what I've got while it's here - and so it is I'm back on the bike and enjoying riding to work once again. If I could share some of my happiness and good fortune around, I would but maybe the best I can do is to wish you well for the new year, and hope that you can find a few things to look forward to in your own near future.