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?
I come from a village in Berkshire – a strange sort of mix of tracksuit bottoms, woods, and dog-walkers – in which our house lives in the bottom of an A road, with a speed limits that over the years been doggedly dragged down from de-restricted, to 50, and now to 40 mph. I live at the bottom of the hill before it broadens out to a flat strip, and when occasional pairs of ‘boy racers’ speed down the hill with their engines shrieking, pushing to overtake each other.
It’s not unusual, but when a neighbour awkwardly pulled the 90 degree turn into their driveway, it was peculiar to lean back, halfway through a bit of teenage HTML coding, to glance out of the window and see two cars impacting into each other and a wall, in a shattering bang that smacked the neighbourhood quiet as the third car went sailing past.
Part of me will forever be the accident rubber-necker. Mostly though as I dialed 999, I felt like a surreal prankster. Accidents on TV will forever be different to real life. I asked for police and ambulance, and tottered out almost too shy to ask if anyone was actually hurt. I think I peered into the wreckage and mumbled “Probably” to the nicest sounding lady on the phone.
It’s not uncommon, and when I moved to London over the summer there was something reassuring about cycling. It’s strange because the cycle lanes seem more reassuring – they were completely absent from the roads I cycled to school down, and Brighton implements them in a lax sort of way in which there’s a white line but with very little red coloured in. Having said that, I’ve never been nearly hit by so many times by idiotic drivers blindly swinging their doors into the roar, and weaved around so many buses, but it was always the cars with the engines that were shut off that terrified me most. And it’s always at the slowest speeds that I’ve come anywhere near an accident in my own car.
In London cars on the road seemed more aware – “it’s a metropolis, everyone active is engaged, busy and aware” the country kid in me explained. Somehow everyone on the move is on some sort of zen level (which is inexplicable given people’s ability to navigate around each other on say, Oxford Street) whilst stationary people are the most terrifying (If you watch the video below, this is a perfect example of ‘the things you look for’).
“You’re mad to cycle in London,” said a friend with an aversion to cycling in general.
“But it’s not scary,” I told her.
“And you don’t even wear a helmet?”
“Admittedly stupid,” said I, citing curly hair and vanity as an aversion, and the niceness of not needing to take a million locks, pumps, hats, and shiny belts on a journey out.
This all very loosely leads to the new TFL advert that’s been put out. What a horrible, cliche, unavoidable ending, I thought, as every TFL motorbike, car or cyclist advert must be. But ooh, I thought, what a delightfully true notion – and it reminded me of The Stoned Driving advert which seems to be on the other end of the stick, and focusing on our reactions to things we’re avoiding; ashamedly, the big issue man for one. Stare straight ahead.
Here’s my very old video from Kinetica that I’ve just put together. Because of camera ineptitude there’s no video of my favourite part: the lights that reacted to sound, but there’s an inadequate photo of them here on Flickr.
The exhibition had a section with the pencils that rotate and make circles (above) – which drew on our ability to stand aimlessly watching pencils draw motorised circles. Something I noticed is that the holder design didn’t allow for the pencils to get shorter – it didn’t compensate by pushing defaultly against the wall, but left them suspended away from the paper when they were blunt going round in sad little circles. Perhaps I’ve got too much pencil empathy.
There’s also the small beer robot that poured you beer into plastic cups and then flashed red in an alert to tell you it’s drinking time. Lots of good stuff there.
Kinetica, a number of Saturdays ago, was a mad mess of flashing lights and things that swirled. I love that it counts as art. I spent the day joining the league of irritating people with cameras, toting an EP-1 that’s never left the house – and thus have video footage.
Beside the robot that served you beer, my favourite bit was a block of hanging lights that reacted to sound. Simple but wonderful to watch. As part of the league of camera holders the adults lined up against the wall to do camera jiggery pokery, whilst a small kid ROARED at them. It was lovely, but I failed to hit the record button or some more technical error (very sad). May have to practice my button-pressing. Video on way – my laziness with it has already delayed this brief post. It will appear one day.
I stole an idea, but we’re sticking with Faris’ notion that that’s okay and it somehow makes me a genius. Bitchbag takes videos and cuts them together in snappy chunks; nice insight to life I think. I liked the idea back in November and also had no video editing skills – a good excuse to master the simplicities of iMovie, if you can call those video editing skills.
Anyway, I got distracted playing around with video from the last half year but finally cobbled together my bits for November and December (which is good because they’ll become massively more irrelevant the minute it hits 2010) . I’ve learnt the pain of removing long chunks of video that I love but no one else would (mostly gig footage), but soon got over it. I quite like them.
Lost my camera charger in December so there’s less chunk-age. Although all that really means is there’s slightly less fit-triggering Christmas lights footage, which I had plenty of anyway.
I saw the Yeah Yeah Yeahs last night. They had a glitter cannon, I was happy. They remind me of a band I liked during college called Elle Milano who I loved to bits in an awkward sort of way. Perhaps they don’t sound too much like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs but they made me very pleased in an “oh god, music!” sort of way and they share similar hair cuts.
Anyway, Karen O was dressed like a butterfly and also a paper-based Indian. They did a great performance of Y Control – there’s a live version on YouTube that’s great but it doesn’t embed (Watch it here). They’ve polished up since some 2006 performances but haven’t lost anything. They’re so fun to watch. And it was all very, very good.
Dylan Moran talks about couples in his new show What It Is. Death, he says, we are all avoiding. When we’re young it preys on our minds and so men and women try different tactics to avoid it. Women try to choose curtains. ‘What colour?’ they ask of the men, waving two nauseating colours of grey cloth around – but men are too busy thinking that lots of sex is the answer to avoid death. ‘Sex sex sex’ they think. It’s okay in the end though because sex ends in children, and then the children pull the curtains down.
I feel like I’ve done a lot of new things this summer, so I made a big list (all with tedious links to relevant posts) because lists please me.
Lived in a big city
Cycled in london
went to barcelona, rome and naples
Saw two lots of prostitutes (Naples)
Saw dead bodies in pompei
Went to a wedding reception as a grown-up (conclusions: danced better as child)
Went to Lovebox and Bestival
Saw Florence and the Machine a lot accidentally
Went to first Tweetups – Cozytweetup in St James’ park, Ale 2.0 and Twestival,
Became a paid blogger,
Started writing for Bitchbuzz,
Went to pretentiousgrad and grown-updesign shows
Went to my first company party (Moo). Stole balloons.
Went to a press conference
Did my longest placement to date.
Walked my soles out in london.
Saw my favourite comedians: Bill Bailey and Eddie Izzard
Was excited by seeing the countryside (felt horrified by this since i come from the countryside and clearly need to leave the city.)
Went to Ben and Jerry’s festival and did Press Pit runs. In front of the crowd is good.
Made candles.
Learned to cook more.
I haven’t made Naples sound great. It was very prostitue-ridden and a restaurant hunt ended in McDonalds. Also best driving at crossroads have ever seen in life – may not be of interest to those who do not like 6 minute videos of driving (I am mystified as to where the 102 views came from: Youtube search must be gold). I would love an aerial view of this:
I like this photo because the man at the front amuses me.
I do a lot of seeding at work. So I feel a lot of dismay that in this post I’m going to have to mention the Vauxhall Free Money Stunt. I don’t want to particularly because it’s not that interesting.
A post today reminded me of a film Ringo Star was in and I saw when I was about 9 on a slow-TV Sunday. As a change from Carry On films, I was pleased. I don’t know if I actually liked it, or whether I decided that satire was a nifty thing I wanted to get in on, like some sort of childhood scenester. A little bit like why I like Catcher in the Rye perhaps.
My Mother didn’t believe me when I said the Beatles had made a film about rich people swimming shit for money.
Today I’ve finally been reunited with the film since yes yes, Vauxhall made a car with £2000 worth of coins stuck to it to cleverly reminding people that’s how much a trade-in discount is worth (yes, the source of this info points out that it’s an effective way of getting a point across, but it doesn’t make me like it). And it was likened to a ‘clean version of Magic Christian’ which I was far more interested in. Here is a clip, it’s sexy:
Trade-in is a nice idea, although my parents leapt on the ‘splash out we’re near retirement’ bandwagon and bought up two replacement cars. The downside is that when you choose to buy the car you’ve always procrastinated over which has limited production, the trade-in time frame means you’re forced to get whatever colour is being produced in the time frame. Which in my Mother’s case is a lime green Beetle. I think that’s another of those things that becomes acceptable when you’re old perhaps.
Thanks to: cakeheadlovesevil where you can see more photos of people grabbing at the car if you’re so inclined.
Cycled to Regent’s Park Treehouses today. Consumed ice cream and saw two Lord Byrons (aka quiffy haired solitary men possing and reading books). We ambled around treehouses and I was reminded about numerous years of childhood naggings for a treehouse – nothing quite as fancy as these things, I’d have been happy with a wooden platform (or rather, that’s what I was pitching to my Dad as the simplest starting point).
At Uni there were rumours of a treehouse two students had made years ago. The directions were ‘up the hill, on the left near the field,’ which was great, but Sussex University happens to be on the Sussex downs: There are a lot of trees. Turns out it existed, and after a good forage round a massive wood we found it. It was miles off the ground and after drunk attempts, a few people made it up into the tree. It wasn’t bad, but needed some love. Then we navigated home with no torch with me using my camera as an occasional torch, ruining everyone’s night vision.
Today ended cycling home avoiding a big rain cloud. The treehouses were pretty sorted; they had umbrellas.
Here’s some photos that don’t ruin surprises, and the flickr set is here.
