Andriod Pain

This Google android phone is a big source of my pain. It allows me to hang onto remnants of my past that is fast slipping away. My wife is now 7 months pregnant and in a desperate grab to hold onto my life I have used this fucking thing to buy too many records I won't listen to and too many books I won't read. This attempt at keeping a life that will disappear extends to too many gigs and too many coffees. My pain is exacerbated by other issues since conception. My poor better half has had a sword of Damocles hanging over her from work while she struggles with morning sickness which persists. My poor mother for three weeks lay in hospital between life and death. This meant a hyper quick trip to the UK. My poor Dad in shock from my mums illness popped his clogs two months later. My beloved’s mother is now on talking terms with her and my normal source of income has fundamentally changed. So this fucking thing is the black hole source of my pain. When times are tuff and they shouldn’t be as we have a baby on the way. I turn to retail therapy on my phone.

HEAD

“The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong."
C. G Jung ,Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1962

 



We live in a world beset with acronyms all in upper case WTF, LOL, OMG. If Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother, Katharine Briggs are to be believed. Their little four alpha-digit classification acronym displayed in a list of 16 MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) . Will list. Yours. Mine and every other person on the planets. Main cognitive sequence functions,  apparently these are set early in our life, and apparently predictive our behaviour FOREVER.

Mother and Daughter were drawn to C. G. Jung's psychological work, which sparked an interest into putting a diner time theory into a practical use. With the onset of World War II in USA, Development of the MBTI initially helped women who were entering the industrial workforce for the first time, identify the sort of war-time jobs they would be good at. This initial questionnaire grew into the MBTI, which was first published in 1962.

These little acronyms result from  asking a series of question to result in, your type, I am ENTP or sometimes an ENTJ once I was ISTJ (but I took the test with a hangover) . Based on this theory it means we can all be jammed into a job of somebody else’s choice, as your functions cannot be changed, be it fisherman, politician, criminal or actor. This also could mean somebodies type would predispose them to jump off  a high structure and this mortal coil .
This doesn’t have to be the ultimate action, but it could be part of a process everyone does, some do it sometimes, others do it regularly, some spectacularly. Creatively self-sabotaging to solve a persistent problem.  

In these days of creatively manufactured bands on the Teev the ‘Monkees’ seem an oddly innocent and talented pop group, all be it in a totally manufactured way. The mid 60s bubblegum teens that watched their zany TV show, they had been forged around, were hardly the hipsters of the era. So three years into the run a spectacular destruction was organised.  By 1968 the Svengalis of the proto boy band, hit upon the idea a stream of consciousness production. A feature film called HEAD, with a real life subplot goal, to destroy the Monkees as teen idols. But it did ultimately destroy the prefab band in the process.

The Film starts with a suicide and ends with the Band suicide, according to the promo this is most extraordinary adventure, western, comedy, and love story, mystery, and drama, musical, documentary satire ever made, with only Victor Matures hairdresser knowing what it was all about.

As a destructive film it could also have been born of either the ‘Dunging-Kruger’ effect’ another cognitive type where unskilled individuals suffer from illusory symptom’s that rates their own ability much higher than it is or its half hyphenated sibling the ‘Imposter-Syndrome’ each one setting somebody or thing on a path to implosion. HEAD was about reinvention it was created out of a stream of conciseness team meeting, its subliminal marketing plan,
deliberately didn’t mentioning the film’s stars.

It also appears to be initially conceived as a vehicle for the producers next film ‘Easy Rider’, (their new direction after the suicide) So that this film, in the ever-changing world of 1969 could be sold with the slogan "From the guys who gave you Head”.The ‘Monkees’ teenies didn’t want to see a psychedelic avant-garde film, and neither did the  New York set of the time, Having already ignored the ‘Monkees’ on TV the now ignored them in Film. Plus the misleading marketing campaign was so esoteric it with just a Head.

HEAD as a film has the , the ‘Monkees’ hoodwinked, bamboozled, chased, assaulted, mocked, trapped in a black box and reduced to dandruff in the hair of the actor Victor Mature, before ending up back where they started. In the words of the sardonic Jack Nicholson who penned a tune, "So make your choice and we'll rejoice/ In never being free!" (This bit came from Wiki)

The film had no opening credits. But a song sung by Micky Dolenz. The Carol King penned Porpoise Song has Dolenz embarking on a Psychedelic suicide being taken away by mermaids. From here there and everywhere, the film morphs into something else. But by the end it becomes pretty grim acid trip, because life sucks and we are all trapped. Production on HEAD wrapped on May 21, 1968. It cost $790,000, and recouped just $16,111 in its first year.

If the team that produced HEAD of Easy Rider were subject to the tick box mentality, that we could be being led into, These brilliant, bonkers ,rubbish , weird, angry and mad fims would never get made, It needs a crazy leap to jam people together , trying to  reduce the risk reducing us all to a tick box, places us in a box in the process. Stifling our strange and sometime bizarre behaviour, which sometimes lead to these insane failures.

Myers-Briggs, and Dunning-Kruger are about why criminals get caught, its why politicians are rubbish and why we sometimes all except less HEAD than we should. Maybe it’s should be H.E.A.D( How Everybody  Accepts Drudgery) . But before committing suicide and in the best Dunning-Kruger tradition we could all make a bonkers attempt at something and fail brilliantly meaning we all really get some HEAD.

But the porpoise is waiting good-bye, good-bye
Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye
Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye
Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye

 

Adelaide and Back

Stairs

In my current abode,The bedroom is on the ground floor as is the toilet but the kitchen is upstairs.It hasn't always been this way. Number one house had toilet and kitchen downstairs,bedroom upstairs. The second house I was acquainted with had the bedroom on the third floor,the toilet on the second and the kitchen on the ground. I then went through four house's where the kitchen was on the ground floor but the toilet and bedroom was up the wooden hill. Leading to the last share house I had in Putney SW15, which had bedroom,toilet and kitchen all on one plain. Don't know why I felt the need to write this down, its all of a bit of bollocks really.

Anyone for Sex ,with a 3D printer

In the psycho-porn amusement park of the future, we will be able to 3D print a compliant partner(s)of our choice, Then instead of being fired into erotic rhythms of consumerism with hands down your pants, staring into a screen. We will all have the ultimate sex toy,a full size,fully complaint, maybe even a self lubricating partner.

Uncomfortable? You will be in this pornopolis of the future.

Until this new time, we will have to let the mesmerizing light box let its stupefying effects wash over us. As humans our eyes are programmed to look at abrupt changes in our visual field. It’s part of our survival mechanism,the colourful quick images of a screen are difficult to resist.

Now that in our current life, we have dowsed everything with sex.  The new emotions created by more and more and our devotion to technology,are reaching into our dreams. Big 3D dreams. Fired out of the sphere, by the power of watching.

Our 21^st Century  mantra is watch not do, My vision with a 3D printer will be. Print, do, don’t watch.

Harlee (Circles) Murray

Born 1961

The early discovery of her sexuality meant that school life was never going to be easy. Protestant, working class Glasgow was an unforgiving environment for him.

Not living up to his parent’s expectation, Harlee ran away first to Manchester then onto London at 15.

Living in a North London squat he fell into the emerging Punk Scene where she knew Richard Dudanski a drummer in the 101ers, who helped him get a job at Rough Trade Records on Kensington Park Road .

He began to produce fanzines and gig posters for a host of Rough Trade artist, Spending the next years emerged in the crucible of Punk and Post Punk, Knowing a who’s who’s (including Dave Stewart who references Circles on the Eurhythmics first Album in 1981) of the music scene, Band Performance did not appeal, but attending a Throbbing Gristle Gig in 1978 his idea of performance changed.

First Came a ‘Punk Nazi’ where dressed as a Nun he would eat swastika shaped cakes filled with Ribena so that performance ended with him covered in ‘blood’ . Usually to a stunned audience.

By the early Eighties found her working at InPhaze records as an assistant which is when Circles began a run of Performance Art before gigs and the performance had changed to

‘Killer Coney’ where dressed as a rabbit she would mince 8 dead Rabbits on a small table. 

During a tour of Europe in 1984 she was arrested in Austria, but the tour proved fruitful in that Hermann Nitsch saw a performance and asked Circles to become one of his assistance in his assistant in actions during 1985,Where she returned to assist until 1988.

He drifted about for 18 months before in 1989 she went on a trip that ended but didn’t finish in Tibet, Circles has spent the last 23 years in Buddhist Counties roaming but also producing. Thangka the painted or embroidered banner which was hung in a monastery or a family altar and carried by lamas in ceremonial procession, plus sand mandalas made for destructive ceremonial purposes. 

During a recent trip in Sri Lanka we met circles  and convinced him to do her first show in 25 years.

Websites

I have difficulty in getting the inspiration to post my own website.

Although possessing the relevant skills to do it myself. I find the idea of posting me up there, slightly intrusive. Plus its not true to the images, now this sounds wanky as hell but the theory is based on this.

To stop me messing with my paintings. I take a picture of them, So I can view them in a different way, if the image works then I deem the painting to be finished. Trouble is this image becomes something different, I have noticed how reproduced images, Usually JPEGs do more justice to the painted work than looking at it with your own peepholes. In very few cases it lets down all but the truly awesome pictures.

I also note that as an artist of any type, some sort of posting is required whether it be it myspace, tumbler ( I take part in that one) Wikipedia or your own site, this makes it’s easy for the pursuer of information to track you down, this is not necessarily a bad thing, but once up, it’s up until amended. It’s an all too easy medium for snap shots of irrelevant drivel. Posting items like this with no relevance at all to the white noise that clutters up everything.

So for the moment I would like to sit in on an analog 1979 and consider things. It not that I am anti-web its part of my work, part of my inspiration, but struggling with this is still twisting the website idea over in my head.