unpopular

pretending to see the future

pretending to see the future, originally uploaded by unpop.

Today's drawing was made whilst listening to Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark

Park Lane is Exeter

Or Exeter is Park Lane...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7007135.stm

Why Don't They Let Us Fall In Love

Why Don't They Let Us Fall In Love, originally uploaded by unpop.

Today's drawing was made whilst listening to The Ronettes.

The Unbroke Part Of It

The Unbroke Part Of It, originally uploaded by unpop.

Sunday's drawing was made whilst listening to Deloris

Thanks to Nancy for digging this out of You Tube for us. Pete Wylie and Jeff Young on Bold Street. What a lovely little movie. I love that line at the end about always bumping into Paul Simpson carrying a bag of second hand stuff.

The Ghosts You Draw On My Back

I just posted three new drawings on my Flickr site if you are interested. No? Thought not. I'm going to try and do at least one of these a day for the foreseeable future. I’ve no idea what purpose they really serve other than to keep me from being bored to death. I quite like them, though, for what it’s worth.

It was lovely to chat about drawing with Meg yesterday at lunchtime. It was like a little fifteen-minute oasis of calm in a day of manic mayhem. We talked about how these drawings are so unlike anything I’ve done before, and how that was quite nice. The fact is, though, that in reality I think they continue my fascination with creating composites where image and meaning become shrouded and subsumed beneath something that appears out of the process of the drawing. I think in a way they are unplanned, organic ink collages.

Does that sound pretentious and stupid? Whatever.

If I was not in London next weekend I would want to be here. Mark Pawson! Man, I dug out one of those old 'aggressive school of cultural workers' badges just the other day and it made me smile. I still have his mini zine of Kinder egg toys somewhere, and that one he did of the plug wiring diagrams! That was SO cool. I'm sure I still a bunch of those photocopies in the Paisley patterns somewhere too... and the book with the dial cover kinda thing going on. The guy was/is a fuckin' legend.

Who has my Ghost World? (pt 2)

Ah crap... someone has my Ghost World DVD as well. And I was really looking forward to watching it tonight. It was going to have been the perfect antidote to a crappy day. Pah. Still, we watched Buffalo 66 again instead, and that was pretty damn fine. Vincent and Christina spanning time. And Yes. 'Sweetness' indeed. Yes. I still can't believe it...

Chilling out

I was playing The Chills all day in work. It was an excellent way of staying as grounded as possible in the midst of madness. It was one of those days where you have an endless ‘to-do’ list, but no matter how quickly you manage to tick things off, a greater number of new demands pile in to take their place. Fortunately(?) the vast majority of today’s tasks were ICT based, so I could bunker down in my room and listen to tunes whilst feverishly clicking a mouse and tapping a keyboard.

The point, though, is that The Chills sounded superb. It’s always lovely re-discovering things you may not have noticed for a while. I was particularly loving the Secret Box set that Martin Phillips put together in 2000/1. It’s stuffed full of live, demo and otherwise ‘rare’ material, all of it pretty much essential. Unfortunately the Soft Bomb website informs us that it’s sold out, although there are a few choice cuts available as MP3s on the site, including their glorious take on ‘Draft Morning’, which is surely one of Dave Crosby’s finest compositions.

And how can you not adore a group who write a song called ‘Snuggle’ and who then proceed to make a smash-and-grab organ driven psych freakbeat monstrosity of it? And that’s ‘monstrosity’ in the best imaginable way, of course…

Who has my Ghost World?

Ramona was asking the other day if I had the Ghost World comics and if so, could she borrow them to read. Always glad to extend the kids’ education I said yes, only to discover that my copy of the graphic novel was missing from my shelves. Argh! So, you know, if anyone reading this thinks, ‘oh yeah, Alistair let me borrow that ages ago… I’d better return it!’ that would be just splendid. Meanwhile, I’m gonna watch the movie again tonight.

And erm, just to show how out of touch I am, did anyone catch Art School Confidential? Was it any good? I know I should track it down because it’s Clowes and Zwigoff in action again, and Malkovich is always kinda cool isn’t he?