There is something lovely about making cheap homemade cakes baked in a cheap student house look exotic with blue icing. This might be related to all the leftover chocolate fingers and chocolate buttons that needed eating. I stole the idea from (untitled) London.

After a weekend of drinking fizzy wine, vigorously baking cupcakes, and hanging up bunting and garden lantern lighting paraphernalia (which looked beautifully festival-like in the evening), Jamie’s attempt at having two birthdays in two weeks is over. Staying at a friends for the aftermath, we spent Sunday on a walk through fields and woods; me with inappropriate gripless shoes and hungover muscles. “Well, you’re hardly Indiana Jones,” I was told as I failed to pull myself over a fence on a minor incline.

We also went to an art gallery, Spacex, that trod a brilliant line down a mix of installations, photography, video and drawings – without being up its own ass – and wonderfully avoided any nonsensical art which hinged on enjoying gallons of pseudo-intellectual art blurb. I suspect that Brighton is sometimes a bit guilty of pseudo-intellectual blurb (I know it is). It was refreshing.

I liked the squid that attacked a submarine, turning on every fifteen minutes and reacting with motion sensors to terrify everyone around it. Perhaps I just like bright electronics and fuzzy fibre optics. It also had a submarine pinging noise to press with a satisfying big red button. I tested it a lot. Here I can be seen not only demonstrating the glory of the Squid Submarine but also doing a loud sort of Cartman/Weebl & Bob impression for unknown reasons.

Straight from the pages of Jules Verne – a motorised model submarine by Cut and Scrape lurches about in the clutches of a giant squid.

Amongst other pieces the slightly porny ink drawings of sea creatures looked like the animals out of George Orwell’s 1984 that used to scare me as a kid.

This summer I have been a shit blogger. Since my dissertation, I have sat on trains for hours, shuttling forward and background from London, swinging from adventures in the city and, then in turn, too few at home.

I wanted a bit of balance, to fit more into a day. A good wifi connection could have worked wonders. Granted, I read the most books I have all year. That was good.

And now I have some time – the first of the summer – and it is lovely. The antsy itch that whispered “I don’t much like commuting with the general public” is fading and I’m excited about working close to home in the future. My short holiday is off to Exeter now. We will go to the zoo.

Everything coming may be out of order from the stored drafts scattered throughout my laptop. For now, this has been the last two weeks.

Saturdays have been spent tidying endlessly and making angel delight.

The idea of the Linear Life plays on my mind a lot. It’s a reoccurring theme in TED Talks too; Steve Jobs and Sir Ken Robinson are both advocates of following what you like, and I swing between two thoughts. One against a linear outlook; for experimentation, commitment, wanting to try things and dreams, and the other lurching back to remind me I’m a graduate without capacious pockets of money. Maybe I just think invigorating talks are hip.

I like this talk a lot. I’m excited about finding a job where I love what I do. I want to make the world better and get involved (or at least feel that I do). Awkwardly for me, the idea of being involved often means being involved with online comms. Cheers Generation Y world.

My Mother said something nice this week.

“You sound like I used to. Like you can do anything.”
“Maybe it leaves you when you’re older because you expect to do great and bold things when you’re young,” I said.

I hope that’s not true.

Johnny Flynn and the Sussex Wit are introduced to us as the next folk sensation, so we plod along to Brighton’s Komedia which sees an excited crowd from far-a-field gushing to see him. Some have brought parents.

The focus is hardly on ‘the wit’ though. Watching, you can see why the audience is mostly female, and listening I can hear why they’ve done well. He’s got a teenage heart-throb haircut which doesn’t immediately tell of his grounding; actor, poet, songwriter, and theatre trouper (citing W.B. Yeats and Shakespeare among influences). His look swings between waistcoated artisan, paint smeared jumpers and as tonight brings, and more often to plain checkered shirts when not on a photo-shoot. But when he sings it’s out of the ordinary and barely fits his age.

When he plays it’s incredibly polished, coming across very much as a performance; speaking briefly to the audience and simply getting on and playing to the crowd. The cellist and Johhny hijack the show and whilst they’re all good, the rest of the band disappears into the orifices of our memory. I could vaguely tell you about the keyboardist’s haircut (mop like) and some languishing strokes from the drumer but I could tell you for longer about the cellist. Shining under stage lights by the all-too-loud speaker, he’s playing with thin strings of horsehair broken and floating about under the bow as it slides about. They steal the show together.

Towards the end Flynn’s enthusiasm ventures out from behind the polish. The second that sells him to me is when he falters and a bit of musician focus streams out. A couple of drunk fans bellow “Oh, Johnny!” and he smirks as he changes from guitar to banjo, and tunes it. Everyone stands politely, and he strums a couple of notes.

Stops, retunes. Looks out, unabashed – strums and stops. The crowd shuffles and they launch into song, playing upbeat notes. They stop seconds later. I grin my face off and squeak my enthusiasm to Elliott, whilst a couple of the crowd look vastly unimpressed. He ignores them and concentrates on tuning. He starts up again, and their enthusiasm’s dwindled, but three tunings and a focus on getting the sound right have made me watch a little closer. What follows is the best song, and is like a couple of their tunes is incredibly catchy.

He is good, and touted as “the next poster boy of the nu-folk scene” by the Times. However, whilst this might seem a frivolous complaint I leave feeling that some of the songs are almost too wholesome, and too easily slide by.

My parting thought is with the support.

My favourite band of the night comes in the form of Dry the River; a awkwardly delightful forerunner. The singer is a chap in a grey tshirt and skinny trousers who rotates about the stage in a silly arm-flailing and angular sort of way. They’re incredibly tight as a band, they’ve got a mandolin, and they’re really fucking fun. It’s upbeat, tuneful, clappy chanty sort of stuff and makes you smile outright. They make me feel at home, included in their well-formed music and jolly as hell.

I recommend you investigate them.

Johnny Flynn – Been Listening by cooperativemusic1
Of them all, I recommend Barnacled Warship

This year’s Brighton Festival might come across as “Brian Eno Week” as Nicola says, because he’s been curating the Festival. We have a big day out and finally pottered around all the bits I’ve been mourning over from behind a window, glued to a dissertation.

Out of the assorted faff of red, blue, yellow and green rooms, bored looking attendants, and quotes on the walls that don’t put much in context (although I nod knowingly, and think “oooh, disco balls” when I spot them) there’s good bits.

Whilst the patch of synthetic grass in the middle of the room makes no sense, and the peculiar humming of flower-shapes-on-sticks and disco balls are mindlessly nice, and we sit on armchairs listening to strange music surrounded by firs, this catches me eye.

There’s a nice electronic music piece. Nothing fancy, but comparatively fun and interactive (nouns Eno might not be a fan of). It involves long benches with thin strands of wire going from a sensor at one end, to the other where buckets of rocks hung off the end. I stand gormlessly for a while until the ‘art lady’ starts lifting taking some out of the basket, changing the idle hum from the speaker. We leap on it, idly worrying that we’ll destroy the exhibition by throwing the rocks into the basket all at once. But it doesn’t, and the pitch goes from very high to very low. It’s incredibly simple in a way, but really nice (especially compared to the other bits..)

Later we stumble into Fabrica where Eno’s out again. Jonathan wrote a brilliant description so I’m shameless stealing it.

“Rather misleadingly titled ‘77 Million Paintings’, the show actually focuses on one piece – a large, evolving graphic up on a large screen at the far end of the dark church. The same aesthetic which drives much of Eno’s music is apparent in the work; it is neither instantly rewarding nor demanding, but instead a kind of slow, transformative experience for which the term ‘ambient’ (traditionally used to characterise much of Eno’s music) remains the best descriptive term I can conjure up.

It’s essentially a series of locked geometric shapes which move through a range of patterns and colours in a sequence determined by ‘generative software’ which is capable – as the title of the piece suggests – of 77 million possible permutations (which would take, apparently, over a thousand years to unfold). The transformations are slow but remarkably evocative.
..
Imagine yourself sat in a church, half-dozing, glancing down at the cobbled floor. As the sun progresses slowly across the sky outside, light catches panes of the stained glass windows high above, and casts a reflection down on the floor in front of you. The light shimmers and shines, ducks behind a cloud, comes up for air. The quality of light changes, and different parts of the window are alternately obscured and revealed. What plays out on the floor in front of you is the combination of chance, nature and design, and it is playing only for you.”

We loved it. Later in the week my parents visit and I show them this cultural hi-light. My Father falls asleep.

Oh hello, lots of shoes hanging infront of a balcony? This sort of arty shit makes me happy. I pottered around Clerkenwell Design Week (by which I mean they lie as it lasts only 3 days) before going to the Pop Up Pirate typography bar thing (Bitchbuzz review here).

I thought a light by Dare Studio was cool, but distracted myself from a lot of things that weren’t that interesting by trying to juggle a camera and a square of pizza. Pepperoni can be a tricky bitch.

It was all pretty interesting apart from the section about floor panels. The band that played from the balcony was pretty good, though I don’t know their name. There was lots of shiny stuff to keep me entertained. And fancy back-lighting of a wall behind a chair. Some of it came in mirrored cubicles. I could have wept. Photos instead of words.

Oh, and a Robot thing that doubled as a bike rack. CAN I HAVE ONE?

An illustrative photo of Brighton beach.

I didn’t have a gap yah. I dropped out of University instead and now I’m about to finish my degree I’m puzzled by the world’s attitude to work.

“Enjoy this summer, it’ll be the best of your life” Mike said.
“But I’m working,” I pointed out.
“All of it?” he said, as agog as one can be through msn.
“Yes” I said, perplexed.

My parents, lovely people, are retiring in a couple of years from long lives of Microsoft Engineer-style IT training and Pegasus Consulting, amongst other things. Apparently way back in the 20th Century they hatched a plan that upon retirement they would move to New Zealand for half a year. I’m not sure why; Lord of the Rings hadn’t yet aired with nine hours of NZ mountain footage, and Tolkien makes little reference to the place in the book. I assume, with my Mother’s keen aversion to America (and also the brand “Tesco”, the two main horrors in her life) they chose somewhere a bit British, and didn’t fancy Australia.

Anyway, I’m not sure what drove them to New Zealand, but forty years after the muttered birth of their plan my Mother mentioned it to me in passing. “You could visit us,” she said. A stylish sort of Wales with a hip accent? I thought. Yes, I could probably do that. But why wait forty years to have what is essentially a gap year? Why is a post-University summer, presumably to spend three months on Brighton beach greedily drowning myself in ice cream and cheap wine the last ‘good summer’ I’ll ever have before I retire? Perhaps the longest yes, but what stops other people doing this if it is indeed so fantastic?

An illustrative fence metaphor.

Three sentence-long anecdotes:

Fun things should always be fun, and not merely invented and discovered when one loses a job or reaches 65. (I meanwhile, am not one to talk, having spent most of holidays beadily interning around but that’s a pre-first-job different scenario.) I deduce there is there some sort of vacuum that sucks a person into work and refuses to spit them out for fear of being unproductive. Perhaps our notion of ‘what is productive’ changes through work. Unproductive is not heralded enough.

Yes, it’s a bit of a privileged outlook, so let’s assume I’m talking to the privileged. But this mostly stems from being halfway through a dissertation writing a lot about Castells’ notion of the Global Network Society which most likely includes you, First World. (In short he says: horray for those that have computers.) A key part is the arrival of flexi-time, and contractual and freelance work. Also with that thing called frugality (later: how to turn potato sacks into shirts) it’s not impossible. For example, a nice Glue colleague disappeared off for a year or so with his wife to Africa to “play with Lions or save something [sic]” and I have a lot of respect for this. Job relocation’s equally viable, aside from the need to learn the different cultural practices in PR/Advertising (for me). I suppose you get the gist.

So, note to self: Investigate another country at some point before age of 65.
And to summarise. For all and for me: more fun with traveling. Less: being sucked into work.

“Students” they scoff. Lazy lazy students, what do they know? Alright, alright.. yeah.

Very excited by my Cress Head, I continued to be until it grew and proceeded to smell like pee. It doesn’t make putting the cress in sandwiches too appealing. Now Mr Cress Head is fully dead. He may have fallen out of the window too. Before it was dead, I got it ready to take some photos of the green hair and inadvertently stuck my thumb through its face.

Careful eggshell realignment took place and I had lots of fun (to the extent cress can be) with my E-P1 on full zoom, focusing on the tiny bits of cress hair. They look wonerfully intricate. So, pretend I’m talking in the voice of Jeremy Clarkson: Here’s cress. Up close and personal.

Woo, cress!