How to mine Drama from Reality [Part 1].

When I tell people that my chosen dissertation topic is ‘walking and art’, I get one of types of ‘interesting’. The first means: ‘that sounds very boring and lazy’. The second means: ‘good luck with that one Josh, it’s shit and you’re an idiot’. Of course, I have said them more than anyone. I deserve it. I hate my topic. I hate art. I hate having to write a fucking essay about things that are so incredibly pretentious. I hate making basic things significant. I hate feeling expected to pretend to respect the people that take all of this rotten bollocks seriously. I hate having to waste my time and eyes on this. I hate that it’s all a trick, there’s so much salesmanship, endless journalist rehash, endless text, endless images, endless fucking installations, endless quirky badges, endless magnetic poetry, the endless stench of recent paint, the endless queuing, the prices, the lack of humour, the ugly aesthetic, the dire and fraudulent in-joke network, the cod-nihilism, the phoney weirdoes…desperate for hierarchy placement, eager for a seat in the café, hungry for DISCOURSE…bleak isn’t bleak enough. This is not civilisation; this is delusion. This is a bunch of liars in rooms with crap telling you that it is not crap, this is a stream of worshippers of the confident, crawlers of the arrogant, servants of the myth of genius – or worse – the myth of correctness, the giant act of superiority of righteousness or fashion or youth or any of these stupid fucking balloons…no practical education? Judged by the followers? What kind of a lift are we trapped inside?

What absolute frog burst this is! I have taken this shit of an establishment seriously, worrying about their opinions and trying to please them…this essay will be the biggest waste of paper since the phonebook for the guy who died in his flat two years ago. Still, I am of course talking paranoid shite and soon enough I will be out of this process [despite depending upon it in order to avoid office land]. Hate and frustration at you art school. You are a farce that I no longer need. I am going to make my work and a living from my work. Or be dead and in debt. I don’t want to work in a job that restricts my thinking.

STAY TUNED FOR PART 2!

Swipe Swipe.

From listening to a Front Row piece on Hamish Fulton found here on the Radio 4 website, I learned of Janet Cardiff's work, which sounds like fun if you cleaver off the usual acre of wank from the following...

The final work in the exhibition involves a journey outside the Whitechapel. The Missing Voice (Case Study B) (1999) is one of a series of audio walks scripted by Cardiff in response to a particular location. These site-specific sound works take the listener on a physical and psychological journey. They combine unexpected new perspectives on everyday surroundings with disturbing flashbacks in a process which mirrors consciousness itself. Leave the Gallery and enter the peeling splendour of the Whitechapel Library. The story ends forty minutes later at Liverpool Street Station having immersed the walker in the 18th century streets and histories of London's East End, and in the memories and paranoias of a complete stranger.

The big word is OUTSIDE. Outside of the studio, the art school and the gallery. Practice on the move. Living not imagining? Do we not imagine everything? Oh god...how I wish I wasn't stupid.

But walk, art, walk, art...two massively open words, two giant ideas, so much possibility between them...you could do anything but it would still only be something, so why bother to hype it into essay form? You can only invent crap around what is, lying to win a prize. Theories are twenty five a penny and points of view are free as air and food and drink and education and willingness to consider, etc. Where will doing this essay get me? What is my reluctance? I have written far more than 5000 words, in fact, I am in love with a version of the world where I could print off my internet journal entries and hand them in. I hope that I have demonstrated sufficient ability in the form of questioning. Don't try to use vocab to blind, it'll backfire. Don't act smart about stuff that you don't care about. I like Hamish Fulton's website more than his art. Art can be a catalyst for new thoughts, but so can anything. Why glorify anything? What is deserving of study and what are the benefits? Why study art?

I am floating on a bed of sick.

Images.

I'm start trying to write my essay, continue to permit distractions, then delete some old files such as these.


My forthcoming, metaphysical rap alias Sprueman's calling card. As stuck on a phonebox near your grandma's block.


An old MSPaint-made diagram.

I have decided to write a personal/autobiographical proto essay. Now.

Small Bang.

Underlying idea: share ideas about the relationship between walking and art.
Research: read several books and many websites, watched 2 videos, thought and wrote often over summer.
Intention: to create an informative and entertaining essay/article for people to enjoy.

Title: Walking and Art, a match made on earth.
Time/era: slimy pond age to present to apocalypse.
Media of study: various; all forms of art, more the thinking behind it.
Place: anywhere with walkable surface.
Artist: various; names appear in the essay.
Theme: how walking plays and has played a part in the practice of artists.

A Glitch in the Matron.

I am all scattered over this dissertation business, and you could add to that scuppered, skewered and shattered. I have been in a cycle of moving notes around and attacking my terrible habit of attacking the task. I can't wait to pass this obligation on to the next generation, I feel that I have learnt something and I need prove it to nobody. Again it feels like belated parenting, strangers turning up angry. Or it's all a fun game to manipulate, scanning the code for cheats or bashing the console until colourful accidents happen. It's a ball of semantic bollocks, this. I'd rather be living and thinking than thinking about life. Since "I" has no fixed definition, it's all approximately bullshit from the start. Acadildo.

Here is a stupid joke. Click to big it.



What really upsets me is the deep emptyness that this task brings to everything. I must change my view back to the one where I enjoy doing it and it feels enjoyable.

Essays.

Essay structuring is difficult without a plan. So I must plan. I have five thousand words with which to transfer my ideas. If I imagine them as bullets, then I could say that each wasted unit of ammunition brings me closer to losing the war. I want to win the war so I can change the colours of the flag to green. Inspired by She Fled Along The Avenue by Patrick Caulfield. See:



I hadn't even asked myself what an essay was. So here's Aldous Huxley, taken from Wikipedia. Since he is dead, it doesn't really matter if he said it or not. After all, only those who profit from a reputation or memory should care about what becomes of it. Right?

"Like the novel, the essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything. By tradition, almost by definition, the essay is a short piece, and it is therefore impossible to give all things full play within the limits of a single essay. But a collection of essays can cover almost as much ground, and cover it almost as thoroughly, as can a long novel. Montaigne's Third Book is the equivalent, very nearly, of a good slice of the Comédie Humaine. Essays belong to a literary species whose extreme variability can be studied most effectively within a three-poled frame of reference. There is the pole of the personal and the autobiographical; there is the pole of the objective, the factual, the concrete-particular; and there is the pole of the abstract-universal. Most essayists are at home and at their best in the neighborhood of only one of the essay's three poles, or at the most only in the neighborhood of two of them. There are the predominantly personal essayists, who write fragments of reflective autobiography and who look at the world through the keyhole of anecdote and description. There are the predominantly objective essayists who do not speak directly of themselves, but turn their attention outward to some literary or scientific or political theme. … And how splendid, how truly oracular are the utterances of the great generalizers! … The most richly satisfying essays are those which make the best not of one, not of two, but of all the three worlds in which it is possible for the essay to exist" (Collected Essays, "Preface").

There are no absolutes in this world of ideas. I am at home on the personal pole, which has a deck chair and a sunny garden attached to it. I sit and recall, then thread my memories around the stuff I've picked out of books and videos.

Academic essays
Longer academic essays (often with a word limit of between 2,000 to 4,000 words) are often more discursive. They sometimes begin with a short summary analysis of what has previously been written on a topic, which is often called a literature review. Longer essays may also contain an introductory page in which words and phrases from the title are tightly defined. Most academic institutions will require that all substantial facts, quotations, and other supporting material used in an essay be referenced. Such references that appear throughout the text will refer to a bibliography at the end of the text. The reason for requiring references is that a teacher can then clearly distinguish between the original ideas and arguments of the student, and the secondary ideas and arguments the student has taken from their research and reading.

STATEMENT: futiiiiile!

The Aim of Strand.

This is where I will be performing, as Jeremy, as Stem, in a month's time...I only need to arrange it with the organisers and I refuse to let my nerves destroy me...I shall use them to give my performance that emotional third dimension which people 'know' rather than seeing or hearing...the old wobbling voice routine, genuine fear made integrity lucrative. Stem will succeed!



Taken from the Greenroom listings site.

Heinz Meanz Nothing.

I could not resist. Pasta shapes are an absurd legacy in dire need of a documentary. If only there was a television programme dedicated to pure, debatable pointlessness...

Jeremy Strand is: Stem Courts, Self-Help Poet.

Overnight, Strand gave to me a piece of joy - his performance persona, all wrapped in bright, edible cellophane. Stem is an Australian poet who aims to soothe his audience and heal them by garnishing his personal experiences in gentle humour. His common themes include sex, relationships and the city. Jeremy began writing ideas as we caught the 86 bus from Chorlton to the All Saints campus. Although these initial poems appear to stray a little from his 'self-help' agenda, they are good exercise for Jeremy and certain lines may appear in criticised updates.

Untitled 2006

You stood over me, a pylon with the lights out
Drool, drip guilt
A sculptor's chisel to my
sad. nude. loss.

I reach for anything when
Even silence seems withheld.

I the child-drawn barcode
You scan my mass of signs
Apostrophes akimbo to the pedant.
You can choose now; it's time
Stay and scorn or laugh
Leave and laugh and scream

Just please be concise
My bladder is openly weeping
and my stomach is need of a toilet

Not bad, Stem. To my ears, the tone needs some adjustment.

Again, Love? 2006

I bought a single
To make a couple
I wore a tie
I break us up
Yes, you can have the bra back
Yes you can keep the gloves

On your crazy patio
Weeding, ten-to-three
Under the might of a security light
Bolstered by the beam
I realised
We'd be screwed without our screwing
Because we really do not match
The demands of aromantic fears
To which I lie to satisfy
Trust breaks into questions
You wonder why I would?
It's sex you lovely idiot
The rest can fall on blades
The rest of it can ache reborn
On ten pence problem page.

I only lied to please you
And that felt good two ways:
1) I was honest with myself
2) It made you happy.

Do it again only much better.

Man 2006

Man's varied
like plants and Pogs
stark smirks crack agog
at the dried drek from our gobs
Tread slow across fine divides
Fantasy categories chatroom clog
I know I, but I's so vauge
No sincere heritage
Little to share
A cauldron of symbols
Cooked pasta from Heinz.

For bus cast-offs these have potential. I will coax the author into making refinements. The other deposits looks rather like titles:

The Woes of Public Transport.
I've Dug Myself a Hole and You're Invited.

I've Dug Myself a Hole and You're Invited sets up a rhythm as a title alone. I will look into this hole. Now I am 'going' to work on my dissertation. I may or may not leave some text here, I feel that there is no reason to be precious about essay scraps. Look to the news just in case - Art Student's Battle for Originality has a poetic heart at least, and maybe even a soul.

Business card.

Here are the facts on Strand. Soon enough, I'm sure, he'll have his own BLOG. Keep peeling your eyes.

Jeremy Talks.

Ideas for my performance personality are ever-bulging. During my [self-imposed] lunch break, I put myself in the Manna café where they left my brain through my hand and pen, onto or into my [rescued from beer] notebook. Now they leave there, and my hand on which I was jotting during the journey back, and join lots of other tacky information on this screen. So here they are - selected works from days gone bye-bye. All subject to editing. I have never 'said' that before in my life. The order you see them is the order in which they were written, first at the top.

Strand and Sons 2004

For this piece, I built two minuture replicas of myself and took them with me where ever I went. The boys, Curtis and Regicide, were born too young to speak so I was the voice for their thoughts. This project gave me a chance to explore the twin concepts of puppetry and parenthood. The boys are now sleeping in the loft of my parents' home, and enjoy the odd trip to the park. This perhaps more of a profound statement, about freedom.

[My aim here is to capture the reflective, positive memory writing style that often creeps into these 'My Work Remembered' things and still cram in a few jokes. I am not sure if 'too young to speak' deflates the rest with its deliberate sillyness. Jeremy must remain serious but likeable, not [self] consciously weeerud].

Fore! 2004

I was a caddy to an imaginary golfer in Manchester city centre. My bag was empty and this made me scream at passing strangers. The odd highbrow dropped twenty pence into my bag. This was method madness.

[A bit too boastful at the end. Jeremy is not arrogant, and that is why he is a performer - he needs to be viewed alone, he loves to be acknowledged, especially for doing something that leads to new ideas for all concerned, he thrives on the belief that his work matters even if only to a small number of 'high'/'open'-minded individuals, who he dislikes on a social level and aims to reach indirectly - it's antigravity darts].

Teach The World To Singh 2003
Rusholme, Manchester has the second biggest Indian population in the country. In this project I urged locals to celebrate their native cultures by joining an enormous queue - of course a symbol of Britishness. The resultant wall frieze is now touring the world, and it shows that not everyone is how you'd expect.

[This is useful - I have to be critical of my own thinking and writing in order to improve my ideas quickly because I want to perform in character at October's Vaudeville. I want to do something a little better than the horribly unfunny fake lunacy that usually appears. I must make him a business card too].

Pixle 2002
This was based on the idea of subtle machine faults that had been programme intentionally by the user in order to empathise with the errors of others. In this case, the natural disorder was dyslexia. After being diagnosed in 2000, I decided to to turn this eternal obstacle into an advantage, as well as make reference to it in my work. In the future I wish to celebrate this beautiful system of logic.

[Too serious, sympathetic and 'good' natured. I like this idea but it is out of character. I do not want him to be real, just realistic. Where is the line? Perhaps I could steal his idea...it's not as if he reads this anyway...]

Other titles from my hand:
Northern Whinge
Temporary Con
LOOK! REAL AMERICANS!
Traffic Island Discs
Oxford Road Charge

The omitted ones, Coastguard, Lie Bury, Cupboarding and Lazy Sunday are too vague to be worth typing up, and I want to draw on my printed shirt templates anyway. More the morrow!

Jeremy Strand: A Biography.

Work in progress, this is. Jeremy is a modern performance artist with limited self-esteem issues. I will issue this when I perform in character. I want him to be a serious joke that scares me out of my shell and mines that otherness bollocks right up itself.



Of course it needs editing and layout conditioning and so on, as well as more jokes but the core has iron fingertips.

Bio Wall Kart.

Yesterday I did some autobiography by mistake - I had been writing 'around' my dissertation topic of the relationship between walking and art.

People have been walking for a load of years, nobody knows when it started exactly, and why would that be important anyway? I started walking when I was years old, but it wasn't until another couple had passed that I began to draw. Drawing was for me preferable to speaking because I could do it alone. I didn't want to talk or to be noticed. I could walk and and enjoyed it, always staring at the ground to avoid dog shit and find treasures by the kerb. I spent a lot of time beach-combing, slow and far behind my family, obsessively scanning the stones for anything interesting or magical, which was my version of beautiful at the time. An object at which I could stare or use in a game, or break into pieces, that was my goal. I wanted to discover something, I was happy enough looking but much happier finding. So when I walk today I see from a greater height but they are the same eyes. I quickly spot abnormalities in my familiar surroundings and novelties in the new places. Nothing seems as exciting as it used to, since I have become used to it. I still love to walk and look and collect in moderation.

So walking came from us as a family not being greatly rich and collectively lovers of the beach and the woods. The Kentish countryside was there, free to all and endless to a child. I once got lost in the woods and had to find the perimeter in order to reach the entrance. I remember being friends with a dummy that had lost its teat, it was light blue, I called it 'Tish', it was my mute flying saucer. I remember family walks where I would be scolded for stamping on a puffy fungus - the sound was magnificent but I had to disguise my joy, first with accident and later with 'oblivion'. Another time we passed under a pylon, I loved the dangerous and friendly sound of that, electricity alive.

During our walks I would be in my usual dreamworld, noticing things that would drag me out, berries or ants or empty packaging. I can never repay my parents for giving me all of that time and space to develop my own world, one which I do not really want to leave. I am not as involved with the popular reality as some others. I have my interests that have come from our explorations, from lifting bricks and opening pods, from the outdoor world and not books, from nature [the living things and the objects that remind us of our existence] and not from technology.

So I can honestly claim that this subject fascinates me, and I can finally stop deconstructing things because that is a mental cycle that has drained its own irony. Of my creation.

Poems.

Salad Sandwich
My favoured lunch needs loaf and leaves
Any green objects to hand
Slice, arrange and serve
I feel no need for fancy names.

Spring Onion
A pitch like being six and waking up at seven
Stripped and ended
Chopped
Do your rings show age?
Who'd've thought your strength was such
To haunt us in a whole day's burps?

Carrot
We've not always been close
I prefer you crisp not limp
But soft retaining flavour
One day you must tell me
Your optimum boiling time

Mushroom
Once my enemy
Swore you're flesh
Bit a few times, too scared to chew
So swallowed
For the pains I blamed your surfaces
Gutty fats and underneath that hat
Those dark lines hiding insects
Always so rotten looking

But now

I celebrate my new tolerance
By relishing your blood


Tomato
The burst too good
I am empowered
A seedy shower
The tiles to be sponged

When clean-knife slices
You spill your content
I have once again murdered
And I shall never be sent to prison

Conker
I once dreamt that I was fellated by a giant fly's head
I look to you conker as symbol of free entertainment
And as moderate problem to insurers

T-Shirt
You are my default and I owe you
Saves us all for my flapping bare torso
Creased and spilt upon
Keeping me normal

Chip Fork
We find you everywhere
But never give you the respect or attention
That the designers might have

Two or three spikes
Plastic or wood
Great for clearing my wisdom teeth

Templates.

Why can I taste sour apple bootlaces?

Here are my instant templates. Front and back.


I must picture the garment in 3D - it will be worn and bodies tend not be flat. Mine certainly isn't. Even the skinniest of characters have ribs and collarbones to deal with. The chests and necks and breasts of people vary so much. Who'd be a fashion designer?


Elbows - now there's a place. These sleeves are short, like my terms of plan. Shoulders too - slope, square...the finished shirt would be redesigned by every body that fills it. Or fails to.

I will come back to this, but first I have some poems to publish. Why did no adult ever say "buts are for goats"? Probably because a child would have replied "butts are for stubbing, sitting and shitting".

Iconic.

Here are some example designs that I made turbo yesterday. They were produced big, all graphics tablet exercise, then shrank to the size that you see them today. Icons or logos can be placed on almost any solid surface but I want the philosophy of association that Sprueman represents to be more obvious - the lad must be redrawn.


Jus' a friend with no past.


The usual grating, garish flare.


The skeletal first born strain.


A wee Nanonaught.

I will have to consider composition for the T-Shirt. There are components to replicate on paint...

Truth Shirts.

I could be shot for that pun. Here are some sizzling snaps for those saucy shirts...


The first is the Sprueman design. Sprueman turned up in France after I began to see things as being connected by plastic sprues [like an unmade Airfix model kit, fresh from the box, wobbling and making those lovely, delicate noises]. Here is one of him, as he has no definite face, more a default/lazy one.


The same design draped over a sagging model.


Here is my computer-assited, hand made proposal diagram.


Here I tried layering the paint. These are special fabric pens by the way. You are supposed to iron the reverse after they have been dry for a minumum of six hours but irons are for squares and I hate their bases. Once this one is dry I shall add more detail.


This is an experiment with material and felt-tip pens. It'll all come out in the wash.

Thing [plural].

I have been fairly lazy. Today's Monday Afternoon Meeting was biased towards fact and featured key deadline dates. But here are images:


I went to the Lake District you know.


Liverpool docks give good clutter.


This is an example t-shirt. Soon it will be the worst example.

Nothing to do with HHD. Is it?

Art in Liverpool was good. Later today I'll be visiting the Victoria Baths for further art. Art supplements in newspapers can be much funnier than the reality of just being there. I will use my graphic tablet later to produce some new ideas for t-shirts. I will find a source of cheap and high-quality t-shirts and decorate them all over with my designs. That is art practice. As for art theory, I will be talking to a tutor on the 28th. I have a time management meeting on Monday at 12:00 until 13:00, then our first weekly meeting as third years at 13:30. This is all important. I have decided that, further to my stupid declaration of everything being trivial, everything is very important. After this phase, I will be free to enjoy both extremes in modertation.

Money/method/meaning/meeting/mumbling/moronic/merchandise/miracles.

HHD#3.

Jeremy Strand is my performance artist. He will be interviewed wearing a shirt that he chose from his crooked wardrobe and drone quietly and sincerely about his work and the philosophical errors of the art business. His movements will be slight but accurate in shape. His life will be eclipsed by his surroundings and he will preach decrypted ideals all over the place. His stare will break the floor, his smile will clean the lens. His gentle and approachable, zen grandfather speech ethic will entice the clueless and his mage/sage mentality will crucify the cynics in their own fields of milkshake.

Jeremy Strand walks among me. His views are some of mine but we don't share chicks. Strand has a stranglehold on the performance scene, the reputation of a harmless maniac spreading its air-into-iron mysticism through the gullible heads of those for whom pretending to enjoy shite is a full-mast priority.

Jeremy Strand and I are off to enrol. 'They' don't know it yet.

HHD#2.

A Selection of Observations Made During the Viewing of Several Videos.

The videos shall be remembered as a good part of today's education. The basis of the artist profile is simple: the artist talking about themselves and their work, very brief [if any] narration by someone else, footage of the work and also of the working process. The artist is seated, perhaps in their studio, and lit in a manner that bolsters their market personality. Exhibitions are shown populated and in progress if possible/performed/'live'. Details and titles appear in a modest white font which casts a light, grey shadow. The year of the art's birth or reign of its existence is shown after a comma, as well as any significant location details.

The video opens with a moving title that represents the series, which also has a terrible 'backwardsy' sound, like someone has just discovered the merits of Sound Recorder. This title gives the promise of the unexpected; exactly what you'd expect from an art video to promise. Of course, the contents are static and second hand, a by-by-product promoting the past. The artist speaks of work gone by, perhaps well used to explaining it and tend to enjoy linking it to their personal life [especially childhood - nobody ever bullshits about their important formative years].

The reflective process is eased forwards by the unseen, and mostly unheard, interviewer. The artist brings a biographical storyline that shows the work part of a bigger thing. It is important that the artist is depicted in their natural context. There is something nice about seeing someone inventing meaning on film [digital video to be precise].

Flick some stills in there. Pan over things silently, draw out the awe. Look at those gestures. Look at the eyes - what are they looking to? Do they aim to maintain contact with the invisible interviewer? Maybe I should have one location and invite the individuals over for a 'chat'...nothing at all pretentious about deliberate informality is there? Natural as swearing with a pause.

I suppose the characters need keywords to describe them before I create them - I already know that I will have a lot of fun being a performance artist and have been spilling titles all down my scraps. Are those artists on the video performing? Who isn't? Isn't communication a compromise? Oh mighty resentment, you give laziness such emotional depth.

Location shots are essential. Artists grow increasingly conversational, animated and confident. None of them discuss their next work but hint at its possible roots. Major [famous/infamous/celebrated/memorable] works are depicted and explained in terms of intention [if known] and reactions [public/critical/personal-artist]. Names and places add authority, the more casual the better, but not so familiar as to suggest a Masonic network.

The end titles: black screen, white facts. Normally 2 screens. The final visual is another credit to the production company which includes a website.

Being bald acts me different. I am going to eat a sandwich containing processed cheese, carrot, leek and cucumber. Because vegetable never scream within our hearing range.

HHD#1.

I am in the library with three videos. Thanks to theEye, who act as a heated Stanley knife that cuts straight to the magic minds of living artists [true at time of writing. The living bit]. My task for this morning is to watch them all and observe. I want to steal the conventions of the art profile you see. Rabid notes will happen. The wanky salesmanship deserves a deep mirror that is free from white drugs.

I am hopefully pretending to be serious about lampooning these personalities and their valuable produce.

Without further ado, let's meet today's detestants [bang goes the objective angle]:



Publicly threw himself around.



Pubicly revealed her secrets.



Publicly destroyed his belongings.

Memory, ordered.

I went here when I was younger:





...with my family. Now I want to go again. It's in/around Aberdeen. Better get walking. Off to town now, in case you were curious. Interactive Arts graduate Adam Cadwell gave me this address on a business card: www.adamcadwell.co.uk. Night.

This morning I walked from Didsbury to here, the Metropolitan Library. I passed through Withington, Fallowfield and Rusholme before entering the outer city district, and I don't really know its name. I noticed fresh students, groomed and decorated, like new toys, no chipped plastic paint. The streets were paved with fliers. The buses, rare at the beginning of my journey, became increasingly common and full as I approached the MMU All Saints campus.

I was thinking about how a dawn where your faith in your life's work was crumbling, about the futility of pure art and academic pursuits, about being the exception, about the joy of letting your perspective change and the youthful feeling of allowing new ideas to replace your own ones. I saw infinite strangers and was reborn as a stranger after spending much time in the company of people who know my face, calmed by the walk's rhythm, happy to be living and observing and contradicting, worrying about how I will get away with it when my 'course' comes to a close. It is secondary. I love the drift, the dream overlay that keeps the typical things fresh. I do not want to lose this. I do not want to have my options limited.

Lake-Art-Drink Write-r.

Back from the Lake District, which I recommend to anyone who values that outdoor world. We saw Langdale, Ambleside, Windemere and a lot of other places which were never Christened.

During our stay, I saw the project for my third year: character acting - the new art architypes. I see six trays of ten-minutes documentaries, authentic yet exaggerated, a balance of scrutiny and celebration. I will be mocking my own pretensions and ridiculous personal dramas as much as I will be copying the styles of the PoMo stars [on a budget]. I see it as reverse marketing. I want it to be funny and truthful. I want it to be as professional as possible considering the technological limits that undergraduates suffer. Because we're too scared/cowardly/lacking in ambition and direction to demand the proper stuff. And the fines are, like, two years of loan.

Beyond? Tonight's event is brthdyprty, tomorrow is prbbly hngvr. My tutor Jane has given me a lot of advice about my dissertation and I feel a lot calmer as a result. I bought my own copy of Wanderlust: A History Of Walking and now nothing can stop the magic escaping my dosy, Mac version of Microsoft Word.

Bosh!

A Walk to Reculver.

I have walked to Reculver on many occasions. I love this walk because the coast has such a range of terrain, a lot of raw sky and tonnes of moving life. I like the air and the feeling of being meaningless that being an over-clothed person on and under ‘nature’ can bring. I like the sea’s sounds and the chaotic looping of wave patterns. I love the huge variations in blue and green. I love the clouds when they are so white as to be solid. I love the worn paths. I love the pornography thrown into the hedgerows and the dated crisp packets among the brambles: preservation of a different kind. The family tree of human design is exposed, pulling the questions into the foreground of your interiors, ‘where was I when they stopped producing Mega Monster Munch?’

The feeling of insects dying around you, the thrill of almost being run over by a pervert’s escape plan, the atmosphere of people who have to walk in groups for legal reasons. There is great comedy in this walk. Change encounters stoke the libido. Canines of rickety temperaments are kept in order with a gentle ‘oh, he’s alright’. Adventure rides a stolen bike. There are thousands of nature-squashing greeters teeming at the styles, smug to be ‘out doing something harmless’. Millions of pounds a year are spent on stickers that make a disgusting family tank into the vehicle of our considerate elders. Such pomposity is a walking stick that you don’t even need for show; you just like making holes where others just tread.



Reculver Towers stand dangerously close to their doom, meaning that one day there will be loads more stone in a tiny bit of sea on the South East coast. The former place of Roman worship [reform that at your liberty] is a grand stone vest drawn by on Sinclair Spectrum. When you reach it, having waded the sputum of Herne Bay and evaded the deadly webs of sheer boredom in Beltinge, you will find your eyes adjusting to the wonder of history falling to bits. One day another church will be gone. Even though it has not functioned as a fully operational House of God for a few years, it is never too late to celebrate. I suggest that we crucify anyone that writes in to the KM Extra.

Despite the flurry of human flaws, including the author, this scene has more to offer than anything else in the surrounding area. There may be a few car park tossers bass-raping the sea life into extinction, you may sense the occasional whiff of cyclist anus and you might just have your possessions borrowed into a mound of ash by the children of the caravan park, but at least there isn’t a fucking New Look.

Post Post-Its.

I am going to a library to gather some information. I need to read critical essays.

Other libraries that I have used for dissertation research:
All Saints
Manchester Central

I need to get existing essays that refer to my subject. To do that I must use my university's library internet site. The subject databases will soap the pipe. My information searches need to be refined, all logically sound. I am going to explore the relationship between walking and the arts but as yet I have no 'arguement'. If I find someone else's essay then I can try to contradict them and feel clever.

It still feels like pretending to be a robot. It'd be better for me to write a journalistic article about it than an academic essay. The law behind it scares me, I have never understood intellectual property entirely, although I can understand why people dislike having their ideas stolen. I am afraid of stealing in my sleep. If you wrote only quotations, perhaps that could be fun. I'd like to throw character dialogue in from Home Improvement.

The biggest mess is transforming all of this aquired knowledge into a readable and linear piece of writing. As soon as I have an argument, I can employ the references as sandbags for a trench. This academia-as-warfare game works well with the old paranoia. Nobody's having my ideas. Trouble is, they're covered in educational Agent Orange. Intellectually unfit; too abstract. So I have to don a mature set of robes and get serious, right this minute.

See you again.

Some graphicals.

A lukewarm lashing of standard issue gruel today cheps. If truth be leaked, worse has gone on.


The title block for my forthcoming comic/storyboard-for-video-performance thing.


A life diagram:
Eating/vomiting/passing your surroundings.


A Sprue Duet logo that came to life.

Thanks, Sarge.

Regarding art produced with/through/about walking, Uncle Wordsworth dealt much poetry based around it as he was a keen treader, sometimes moving huge distances across our country using only his legs and feet. A poem that may cut into that can be found here: http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww294.html. I must read it tomorrow and decide which part/s to turn into a/some quotation/s.

Pest.

A song from the perspective of a garden pest perhaps. I just love the word.

It relates to my work because I am going to be a conceptual musician. No modern art course could refuse such an idea. I will 'lovingly parody' 'the' musician and subtlely sink my tongues into 'the notion of the teenager'. There need be no sub-intellectual justification because:

a) it is boring
b) it is pointless
c) you only believe what you choose to believe
d) such conceptual justification is metasalesmanship...
e) ...which is often boring
f) ...and unconvincing
g) ...and desperate

Therefore there I will talk/read/write that rubbish no more. After the dissertation.

So, Pest, go and be written. "Alright" says Pest. Josh exits with Pest.

Serious.

This data dump is for third year work I promise. It feels more mature already, as if these last few weeks have given me insight into the heart of Our Mother Globe's pulsing brain.

Or, more probably, I am happy to have a chewing gum's eye view of talk, soles and the side of expensive monuments.

Deep down, life is mostly dry with a thirty percent chance of hot coffee in the next three minutes. I love everything today, even if it's late.

My work begins tomorrow, graphic tablet drawings for all to see.