Open Milk Tray

I'm very close to throwing my computer out the plate glass winders onto the buskers below. It's an icy December Friday night, I should be out boozing and telling people what to buy me for my birthday. Instead I'm am still jammed into a laptop, reading my last post with an embarrassed and disdainful snortle.

But lo!- tomorrow is an Open Day in the studio I rent, and I made the ridiculous promised to myself to have made an E.P. before the year's end. That is why my computer keeps crashing.

If I, or the pc, make it through the night, feel free to visit us from 12 to 5.30pm, where I'll be thrusting copies of my homemade nightmare into the hands of children.

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On an unrelated note, I must remind myself not to buy jeans with shiny studs in the arse again. They may fulfill my yen for teenage slutduggery, but they give more dimples on the ass than a Milktray, and are darn uncomfortable too.

This Is Not A Serious Post, But a Postal Series

My head has been stuck in my laptop for ages now, working, would you believe, not just googling "school boy rugby".

I'm working on a baby wee Extended Play c.d. for release on Saturday, featuring four sound drawings and songs. I'm getting so into it, they're all I can think of. I may have aural obsession and can't get that canon chorus from betwixt my ears.

That may or may not account for my lack of blog, lack of words, lack of interest in much else apart from 1 2 3 4 and skipping beats and atonal harmony.

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It will all be over by Saturday, thanks God.

Hannah Hoch

For some reason I agreed to teach a short college course on art history, which is patently ridiculous because I think I was asleep for that whole jazz during college. Time to Wiki-it up, copy and paste and Robert Delaunay's your uncle, I'm a genius.

On my internettical travels from Der Blaue Reiter to Surrealism, I rediscovered Hannah Hoch. Hoch was a member of the Berlin Dada group, a bisexual and an artist. As much as Dadaists and Surrealists ejaculated about equality and a level playing field in cultural life, of course they meant just for men. One of the members of the Cabaret Voltaire did remember Hoch, though, for the beer and sandwiches she always managed to provide despite the group having no money.

Well done Hannah. Her work rocks; por ejemplo-

Five UnEasy Pieces; Je Vous En Prie

1. The days are sliding past like fit young men playing wartime baseball; lean calves slowing their gait and hands splayed to stop at base.

2. There's a piece of tape sticking like a tongue out of one of big, draw-down windows opposite. I wonder which Mauritian guy living in that tiny bedroom uses it to open the jammed window jambs when he gets hot, if he gets hot, on nights after work in the middle of town. It visually bothers me because it ruins the up-down lines of the rest of the windows, like a rogue white tampon string wriggling it's way out of a page three pair of fancy knickers. You don't want it there; it spoils the illusion.

3. Work is hard to do today. I feel the increase of stress and the decrease of time, sprinkled with a dash of crippling self-doubt. You'd think I'd have gotten used to that by now. My starsign said that I should get going with the work and action thing, cos of Mars and Venus being in my element, doncha know. I just feel worse and wasting and choc-full of spent potential, like a tired old clown. Even though I didn't even try.

4. I cried hot tears of self-pity yesterday on the couch. The catalyst was The Lost Prince, about George V's epileptic son. The fluffer was the dog bone on the furry carpet, its creamy and glistening knobs of shiny cartilage in opposition to the remnants of stringy scarlet flesh. Sitting on the wiry chenille rug, I felt sick and thought of cows.

5. This morning I was dreaming. There was a new road from Bray to Greystones over the hill, dangerously near to the cliff, and you had to trek with a guide. The guides were Victorian and West-Brit, and wore corsets, britches and crinolenes. How did I get here, and how can I get home?

He Moves Through the Fair (Like an Ass)

Oh my Holy Jesus. This has just completed my Friday.

Love the ginge. Love It.

The Condescending Waitress Has Her Say

Dahling! Usual please, dahling, quick as you can.

Gail is a millionaire's brother who frequents the toilet basin I work in. If being sister to a millionaire is ever on the cards, I would recommend it. It seems to work for her, and she works for no one.

Her usual is at least three double vodkas a night, a double shot extra hot latte with no foam, dahling, the carbs, you see. Gambas a la pil pil is consumed without the bread, dahling, the carbs, and maybe a herb salad.

When others talk, she shouts. When others stroll to the loo, she runs. She is manic, hyper, crass, blasty and completely herself. The more middle class amongst us berate her for her total lack of nous, myself included, especially after she wandered up to the dessert counter and picked off a corner of one the meringues, declared it "not squashy enough", and spat it out. She carries on like a raving, unsocialised loon; there is no "class" enough for her LV festooned size 8 skinny arse.

But the tides of my opinion have turned and now I rather like her. She is oddly generous with things, money and chat. She never looks down on you, which I also rather like. She swears like a sailor after a bout of solitary confinement and is like no other person. Her whole being offends the petit-bourgeouis mentality of that damned restaurant, with their shopping trips to Harrods and little shacks in Saint Tropez, and waxed and untaxed wads of cash.

We ape her and fawn over her and roll our eyes up to heaven, declaring her Unbelievable. We bitch about her when she stays drinking with her hangers-on way past closing time, and threaten to disgrace those garlic prawns if she so much as dares to complain about them.

But on the whole she seems lonely, her children gone and her friends as vacuous and shorn of what was beautiful in the Eighties as she is. Why else would she sit day after day in the same seat and screaming obscenities at acquaintances who shrivel in embarrassment at her call? Don't get me wrong; I don't pity her, you couldn't, she's too hard, but...and this is a big thing for me to say about a rich, spoiled 50 year old toddler...I don't mind her.

What I Wouldn't Like to Meet

Cool stuff on the DART.