art day

"Art is really popular these days," said Jamie as we prepared to attend the last day of the blockbuster Anish Kapoor exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. It was to be open until midnight, when the more ephemeral of the sculptures would be shut down, finding themselves a final visual state.

It was a funny feeling settling in amongst the throngs of people — as crowded as at an Underground station — waiting for a thirty-ton mass of red wax to move at an interminably slow pace though five galleries.

The exhibit was a good deal of fun — it felt both robust and whimsical, challenging and entertaining. And this from an artist who says, "I have often said that I have nothing to say as an artist."



This image (of our boots, again) just doesn't do justice to the mind-altering experience of the room of mirrors. They were like sophisticated fun fair mirrors: They made you look weird, and at moments they'd make others look, as Jamie put it, as though they'd appeared from an alternate universe. With some, you couldn't see yourself until just the right angle, when your face would suddenly overtake the mirrored surface. With others, you felt as though you were going to fall in, so disorienting was the perspective. Watching others experience the mirrors was like watching people trip on drugs... They stood goofily, their Cartesian reality intact to outsiders, yet you knew they were undergoing some kind of mind alteration.

At "Shooting Into The Corner," in which a cannon blasts red wax once every twenty five minutes, we again crowded in with a throng of onlookers. The young gallery assistant who was set to fire the cannon had a floppy wave of hair and a theatrical poise as he prepared the cannon. He stood alert, with hands spread wide and open, until the precise moment when he was to let loose the shell of red wax, weighing nearly twenty pounds, at a speed of fifty miles per hour. Waiting with anticipation, the crowd was like the physical incarnation of a bunch of internet voyeurs waiting for the money shot in a live cam jerk off. His load hit the far wall and the audience erupted in applause. I got the giggles.

In the last room, "When I Am Pregnant" was simply a swollen round shape that somehow looked completely flat from straight on. "What are we looking at?" said a sweet older woman. I pointed out that she should walk to the side and a protrusion would become apparent. "So it does!" she smiled. "An optical illusion."

Tripping through the open air — past the animated clocks in front of Fortnum and Mason, the old fashioned department store, and through the Christmas follies (and climate change protesters) of Trafalgar Square — we stopped for a whisky and Guinness at Retro Bar. Jamie was loving the gaudy decorations.



Our final art pilgrimage of the day was to cross the brisk Thames for a program of film shorts at the Tate Modern. By the time we emerged, people on the streets were starting to stumble a bit from their after work spirits. Friday night in the capitol.

market day

We were indulgent today; you know that day in December when you wind up Christmas shopping for yourself instead of others? I picked up the new Apartamento magazine at Artwords, and the free zine Pix because of it's amazing portrait of the boys from These New Puritans shaving each other's heads. We went to Franco's next door, and ate Italian and looked through the magazines a little and talked about stationery ideas, without a notebook to write stuff down.



Jamie got a beautiful new pair of Hudson boots. Here's his new brown boots on the pavement at Spitalfields Market.



The slide we bought for four pounds at the market. It's called Master Tommy Says Goodnight. There were other things we wanted, of course: A 1970s school ruler with green stripes and Gils Sans font, an Italian lamp. This was the one thing we had to have.



A small Christmas decoration in the gardens behind Folgate Street.





This is just the part where old streets that Jack the Ripper walked meet new glass buildings.



The Christmas decorations in front of Dennis Severs' House.



Jamie ordering a half-pint at Bricklayers' Arms. I told you we were having an indulgent day. Notice the Merry Christmas sign in the window.

the corner house

Everybody when they're young needs to live on the outskirts of town. Not where it's the suburbs yet, but the places where the building height fades a bit, and the post offices seem grumpy or lonely-feeling, and you have your own secret park, and you wonder late at night at the club how you're ever going to get back home.




Jamie and I have lived in a lot of these neighbourhoods: One was one the street we all called "The End Of The World." It was so windy it hurt, and the street was so steep that one time a drunk driver let his car roll right through our front door when he was trying to park. We had secret places that we felt nobody knew about, like the Mexican sandwich place, and we spent time online daring each other to do scandalous things.

These are the places where your imagination stretches a bit more, and you feel a bit of space around your head, the kind of space we try to include in the artwork for our cards and calendars; there's something ruminative about these areas.




Quinnford and Scout have the address number 1, because there is only one house on their street; it's just their flat and then it becomes a parking lot. (The hair salon below their flat takes its address from the cross street as it's on a corner.)

Quinnford and Scout live near a vegetarian restaurant and an underground bar that we never got around to going to (though in central Manchester, we did go to the underground bar in a former Victorian toilet) and a load of charity shops. Quinnford and Scout ride bikes when they don't take the bus. Their flat has really tall ceilings. Everybody's favorite thing, that and hardwood floors, no? (Why do people say hardwood?) Anyway, they don't have wood floors, they have a carpet that they often use for lovemaking. Perhaps you've seen the pictures; they take lots of lusty ones.



It's here in this flat on the outskirts that they have a kind of secret laboratory of creativity: A quiet, clever, lustful and sweet creativity, their lines informed by both graphical minimalism and rustic music by bearded men. They do this and that, take pictures, illustrate, design, come up with fake companies (Wildlight makes light bulbs shaped like animals). Scout cooks (except when Quinnford chops the onions); Quinnford sings a lot, and dances. He said one time that he modeled his facial expressions on the dog he grew up with, and it suddenly made sense the looks of adoration he gives Scout with his sparkling eyes. You can practically see his tail wag.

Here we read books and made two leatherette couches into a "cube" in which to sleep at night, and watched episodes of TIN TIN and a bootleg of PONYO of such good quality that we didn't know it was filmed at a cinema, until somebody's silhouette appeared, a woman getting up for the toilet then returning a few minutes later.



My second favourite part of Manchester is the canals, which reminded me of A TASTE OF HONEY, a film which I incessantly talked about. If you walk into town from the canals, you pass by what used to be The Hacienda, and is now luxury flats (its ground floor car park is clad in metal with laser cut Hacienda facts: When The Jesus And Mary Chain played, and when so-and-so DJed, and the Happy Mondays and so on.) If you keep going, you get to Canal Street, which is the gay district. Quinnford used to wait tables at a place called Queer. If I lived in Manchester, I would walk along the canals, across its bridges, under the trains, just like Rita Tushingham and her camp gay friend in TASTE OF HONEY.




Along the bus route into town, we'd pass the BBC; it's where Radcliffe and Maconie live, is what Jamie would say. Radio floats like a fairy tale; any concrete building that contains it will almost seem like a prison.

My first favourite part of Manchester is Quinnford and Scout's dark blue, high ceilinged, slightly damp flat. There is a stately and modern and impressive cultural centre in Manchester called Cornerhouse; but Quinnford and Scout's is my corner house: The only house on the street, except the hair salon, which takes its address from the cross street because it's on the corner.

restless mind

I've been thinking about Mark Robinson. Through his band Unrest, he introduced me to the American painter Isabel Bishop. I liked his graphic design for his record label TeenBeat so much that I even put a fold-out photocopied mail order form on my bedroom wall. (That was the little room above 16th Street between Valencia and Guerrero; what a summer.) I stole the title of the Unrest song "Make Out Club" for a chapbook of autobiographical writing I did a few years back. (Some guy in Boston built a whole social network site called makeoutclub.com in the early 2000s, and it really was a precursor to Friendster and MySpace and Facebook and all that, and by the looks of things, it's still going.) But back to Mark: Mark Robinson is totally a secret hero, and I think the history of indie music is a bit brighter because of him.

a grey day...

...is the right time for Swedish pop.


...should smell like balsam fir.


...and a cup of coffee and Cabinet magazine.


...and I don't know whether I can watch any more episodes of Cracker, it's so very bleak.


...turns to night; shall we go to see the lights in Hyde Park?

good morning

Granola (by Jamie Atherton by way of Jamie Oliver)

makes enough to fill one jar

200g rolled oats
150g mixed nuts (hazelnuts, almonds, walnuts, brazil nuts)
50g mixed seeds (sunflower, pumpkin, sesame and poppy if you please)
50g dessicated coconut
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
150g (or less if you're us) dried fruit (we use apricots but you could add cranberries or raisins)
5 tablespoons runny honey (or maple syrup)
5 tablespoons olive oil

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/gas 4. Put your dry granola ingredients, including the coconut and cinnamon but not the dried fruit, on a baking tray. Stir well and smooth out. Drizzle with the honey and a little olive oil and and stir again. Place the tray in the preheated oven for 25 to 30 minutes. Every 5 minutes or so, take the granola out and stir it, then smooth it down with a wooden spoon and put it back into the oven. While it's toasting, roughly chop up any large dried fruit. When the granola is golden, remove it from the oven, mix in the dried fruit and let it cool down.

Once cooled, serve the granola with milk and/or a dollop of natural yoghurt. We keep it stored in a medium-sized airtight Le Parfait jar.

leapt from the page?

This feels a bit like a TV commercial by the end, but I couldn't help but be reminded of our own drawings when I watched this.