I'm currently stuck in a loop of commuting and long hours. Some of which can be slower than your common or garden hour. I seem to have amassed a huge amount of scribbled nonsense and thought that I should really do something with it, so I captured it using the witchcraft of the "scanner" and imprisoned it it a blog, destined to float through the vacuum of the world wide web forever with a one in a million chance of it bumping into a dramatic chipmunk, 911 conspiracy website or that video of the cat jumping on the baby. A bit like the lost Russian cosmonaut or
Zod from superman 3. Or possibly 2. Either-way, it's artish, created for the sake of itself and with no particular direction and hopefuly something I'll look back on fondly when I'm a brain in a jar.
I was a bit disheartened when none of the shops on the promenade at Lytham St.Annes stocked sandcastle flags anymore. I felt sorry for the youth of today and decided that they'd probably been taken off the shelves for the reasons of political correctness or health and safety.
Possibly because they created feelings of sadness for those children who's parents denied them such innocent pleasures and didn't want to waste money on beach litter and splinters. Deprived children, destined to labour under the baking Lancashire sun only to have their painstakingly conceived sandcastle upstaged by the next families for the sake of a couple of flags.
Essentially, they are "pretty litter". Seemed a rather tenuous yet fitting way to introduce my blog of scribbles and ephemeral rubbish.
And the moral of the story?
I wasn't looking in the right places.
You can still get sand castle flags. I was bought a pack. They now live in a drawer in Birmingham.
The above thoughts got me thinking about branding and innocent patriotism and on the edge of sleep, halfway through Pan's Labyrinth, compelled me to draw sandcastles. I shall eventually develop some of the characters further. Stick them on tea towels or aprons.
The above pages were conceived in a hotel in Manila. The page on the right, a doodle on a page removed from a book of Filipino ghost stories (plastic packed- I wasn't to know that it was written in a native dialect and thus- with the exception of the lyrics to Don McLean's Vincent- utterly illegible). There are still a good 95 pages left. The page on the right, as the address will confirm, is a real life Manila envelope. I am a man of simple pleasures.
I woke up one night with the phrase "we dream the living," flopping around in my sleepy head.
Whether my unconscious invented this or not (original thoughts are very hard to come by) I felt the need to get a glass of Vimto and write it down. The rest of the pages grew tumorous from it's potentially plagiarised seed.
I quite like the unlikeness of Joey Ramone. It has a value of exactly $3. I found them clammy and tatty in the bottom of a bag.
The wonders of nature and evolution.
Some ideas seem really funny at the time. Viewed a day or so later, I'm just confused.
The star constellations of the southern hemisphere, as seen from the number 45, stuck in traffic after a stray number 69 mounted the curb and got a keep left sign entangled in its undercarridge. Doodling on guides to star constellations in one of my favourite methods of chance character design.
No comments:
Post a Comment