Sue's inane ramblings

Last weekend G, Natalie and I went to the St Margarets summer fete on the green at the end of our road...  (yes we really are that twee, despite G's regular hypocritical shouts of "fuck off you twee bastards!" whenever 'The Archers' comes on radio 4.)  

Alongside the usual array of cake stalls, bric-a-brac, ludicrously expensive hand-crafted jewellery and shabby chic homewares, this event gives local bands a chance to perform to an unlikely crowd.  Last year we had a gang of baby-emos who all slanted in the same direction.  This year we had the cutest group of baby-rockers (described in the brochure as "metal-ish with lots of energy and keen to show their talents").  We couldn't wipe the indulgent grins off our faces as we watched the lead singer scream into the microphone with his barely-broken voice while his band-mates head-banged for England.  One of them had his entire bum hanging out the back of his teeny-weeny jeans.  The mosh pit included mums, several toddlers and a gaggle of adoring schoolgirls who clustered possessively around the band when their set ended.  Bless!

This event, along with the Christmas fete every December, is the highlight of the St Margarets social calendar.  As a result it tends to bring all of the local C-listers out of the woodwork.  We spotted four this time... Milton Jones (local comedian) Jason (the sweet, baldy, pet-like presenter of the Gadget Show, for some reason judging the dog competition), someone off Corrie (no idea) and Nick Frost (propping up the beer tent as usual).  Sadly no sign of the lovely Anthony Head, so perhaps he is not 'local' after all :-(

Still, we did find a fab set of cast iron kitchen scales for a tenner... (alright, I am a twee bastard and will fuck off accordingly)

For some time now I've been feeling artistically jaded and seem to be lacking the slightest glimmer of inspiration.  I fear I may be starting to tire of my recent immersion in ye olde World of Paintcraft.   I'm certainly looking back at the joyful (albeit less skilful) pop-art nonsense of my early dabblings with more fondness these days. 

So imagine my pleasure last week when I visited the museum of modern art in Nice and fell totally in love with Yves Klein.  A brand new love affair - hoorah!  Although I was aware of Klein, I had before never seen - or even heard of - his series of works based on pure pigment with gold leaf.  They totally knocked my socks off...  

This piece in particular is the most stunning thing I've seen in years.



He has cast a human body in bronze and then coated it with his patented mixture of pigment and some kind of magical synthetic resin that makes it look utterly pure, as though it has no binder whatsoever.  You feel as though you could dip your finger in and the tip would come away covered in blue powder.  The whole piece is mounted onto a wood panel smothered in gold leaf.  It's just so delicious in the flesh, this photo does not do it justice.
 
A few other nice pieces include this female form, and a series of hollow glass tables filled with powdered pigment and sheets of loose gold leaf. 

Intense colour may not be everyone's cup of tea but, for me, it is so pleasurable that the act of grinding paint can be more exciting than painting.  Sometimes the little piles of powder on the glass slab are just so intense that I want to dive into a vat of them and never come out...    (and no, I don't mean that kind of powder!)

A key characteristic of powdered pigment is that it has no surface shine at all...  it's a bit like looking at the softest and most vivid piece of velvet you could ever imagine.  In my view, Yves Klein has done something miraculous here.  I really did not think it was possible to get pigment to remain so stable and unfading (given that they are 40 years old) without some kind of binder that tempers the hue and removes the velvety appearance of powder.   He has got my cogs whirring anyway...  which makes a change.

My work ethic has gone on holiday a day early, so I have decided to waste some time on LJ.

I may have got the wrong chromasomes at some point, cos this post is mainly about Stuff and just how much I love it...

G and I recently became proud parents of Mrs Norris, a cute little robot vacuum cleaner who bimbles around our flat doing the hoovering all by herself, before pootling back to her docking station to re-charge.  When she's finished, she plays a trimuphant little tune to let you know.  One day she was naughty and broke a vase, then she tried to clean up after herself.  (We told her off in the way you might tell off a kitten that has just broken a christmas bauble.)   Really I can find no down side to this... everyone needs to get one.  Robot servants are the way of the future!

Ohhh - the future.  I've had several discussions recently about my deep envy for future generations, who are going to experience so much more exciting stuff than I will ever see before I die. 

For example, is there anything more exciting right now than rapid prototyping?  The idea of a machine that 'prints' fully working 3d objects that you drew on your PC...  the possiblities are endless.  Ok, right now it seems to be mainly used for producing white plastic prototypes, but imagine when they make one that contains the entire periodic table as 'ingredients' that it combines and assembles based on whatever you tell it to make...  gadzucks.

Few people seem to share this future envy with me.  G's mother argues that she would prefer to go back in time and live the life of her mother's generation, when life was simpler.  Hmmmm.  It's not that I don't love a bit of vintage, but I have trouble getting my head around this, especially from a female point of view.  It seems to me that everyday life has never been so good for women in this country.  Am I wrong?  Our great grandmothers appear to have spent all their time skivvying around the house, spending whole days on laundry and ironing.  Who would want to go back to that?  Not to mention dying in childbirth all over the place, and not being taken seriously in the workplace... assuming they could even get into the workplace. Yeek.

Give me a future where gaming and cinema have merged to become a great big 3d interactive reality experience...  where you can get anything you want made by the machine in the corner of your room... where blindness and deafness are conquered by fully working robotic eyes and ears, and you can grow a new limb from your own cells, and combat the ageing process.  I hope I get to see some of these in action before I die.  

http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/V/victorian-passions/

(Tonight's episode focuses on the sexual explorations of Sir Richard Burton... thought you might not want to miss it)

Today I am pondering a question about animal behaviour.  Why do animals make a noise when injured or in pain.... what is the evolutionary advantage of this?

The only plausible answer I can come up with so far is that it may stem from the need for baby animals to alert their mother when they need assistance.  But shouldn't animals grow out of this when their mothers are no longer around to protect them?  

A farmer's son once told me that an easy way to catch a fox is to make a squealing noise like an injured rabbit.  Foxes will come running if they are within earshot of the easy prey of an animal in distress.  So... why do the rabbits squeal?   (Is it just that they have not needed to evolve the survival mechanism of suffering quiet distress, because the strength of their breeding speed off-sets these losses?)

A slightly related question is this:  are humans the only species that will run to the aid of a fellow creature in distress, assuming that the creature is not one of their own immediate offspring?  I hear tales of dolphins rescuing drowning men...  is this for real?  

I once saw an interesting (and tear-jerking) David Attenborough documentary about lemurs.   A baby lemur died while calling for its mother - she did not reach it in time and it fell from the tree (believe me it was *really* tear jerking).  Immediately afterwards the other lemurs in the social group clustered around the mother and started to stroke and groom her, as if comforting her on her loss.  I found this quite a profound example of animal behaviour that hints at a lot more going on in the minds of animals than we currently understand or assume.

 Unfortunately this story starts with an admission of extreme geeky sadness...

The other night while falling asleep, G and I played a game of verbal top trumps along the lines of "which Buffy character would you rather shag".  For G, Willow wins every time.  For me, bad Angel trumps Spike and Giles trumps everyone.  What can I say - shy, tweedy geeks bring out the predator in me... Rawr!

We concluded afterwards that there is not a person alive who would not think less of us for having heard this conversation, so I am aware that I REALLY shouldn't be writing this on my LJ...  but it does set the scene so nicely for what happened this morning.

While trotting miserably down the road to St Margarets Station, who do I spot walking right in front of me all the way to the station but Giles himself...  wearing a Gilesy-looking jacket and everything!  In my home town... standing next to me on my train platform... the original, lovely, cheekboney, tweedy Giles, better known as Anthony Stewart Head.

What was I to do?  Luckily for him, I was neither sufficiently caffeinated nor alcohol-fuelled to pounce on him and declare undying love.  Instead I stood with the utmost British repression trying not to cast sidelong glances and then got onto a different train carriage.

Sigh.

This reminds me of last summer when I spotted the fabulous Nick Frost in the beer tent of the St Margarets summer fete and the poor man fared far worse.  Something about the informality of a beer tent made it possible for me to accost him and wax lyrical about being in mourning for Spaced.  He was very gracious... bless him.

G sent me this amusing little Brooker-rant about video gaming, along with the comment "I read him ranting and I can hear your voice"....    (flattering, but I fear I will never fully scale his heights of joyous, foul-mouthed vitriol).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/may/12/games

This bit made me chuckle...   "The irony is that every time I read some dumb anti-gaming proclamation by Vaz and co,  I get so angry I have to fire up GTA IV and shoot 29 pedestrians in the face just to vent the frustration they've caused. Thank God these games exist, or I would be taking it out on real people."

If I am to be honest though, I do personally struggle with ambivalent thoughts about gaming violence...    having spent many a happy weekend perfecting the use of my M16 or 12 bore shotgun on game-baddies... or extolling the infinite joys of the sniper rifle, I would nonetheless struggle to explain myself to my gran.   In fact, beyond the deeply nerdy joy of choosing the right weapon for the job and perfecting the hand-eye coordination to get in a good head shot, I don't think I get any kick at all out of gaming violence..  In real life I am as pacifist as could be.

Could it be that human beings are actually three dimensional beings capable of understanding the difference between pixels and the physical world?

Had a lovely meal out last night at Vanilla Black, thanks to 

steer

saralou

rosamicula

thirstypixel

gothgrr

Favourite comment of the evening:   "meat is murder, but fish is justifiable homicide" (...a damning truism from Mark on the bizarre morality of pescatarians like me!)

Second favourite comment of the evening:  "Decaf!!!  What the hell is the point?  It's like food without meat, cigarettes without nicotine, shoes without heels..."   (from the girl with the latex suit.)

And in case either of them forget, I want it known that I am very much looking forward to
 a) being fed again by Rosamicula 
 b) being taught about wine by Sara Lou...  who really doesn't do cheap :-) 

Having a bad day at work...  was going to try and describe, but this eloquent verse does it pretty well for me:

    People just ain't no good
    I think that's well understood
    You can see it everywhere you look
    People just ain't no good

Bah! 

Mind you, the promise of this evening's din dins at Vanilla Black is doing its manful best to cheer me up...

So.... it's a bank holiday weekend, and it's kind of dark outside and pissing down.   For some reason this makes me happy...

Morrissey's melodious tones are singing out that every day is like Sunday and my Xbox is telling me it feels neglected.

G is planning to make a gorgeous wild mushroom & filo recipe he got out of Hello Magazine (yes, really).

All of our weekend socialising is now done. 

Ahhhhh...   

:-)

I just got a sneak preview of my exam result...  and I passed!  Not only that, but my colleagues all passed too, so we are now a big fat glass of wine richer and an afternoon's workload poorer.

Hoorah!  :-)   

Well, here is my latest ebay folly...   a thing of rusty beauty that I am currently wearing as a pendant.   Unfortunately it keeps time a little less accurately than a sundial, but it does tick rather pleasingly.



Ohhhh ebay ebay, how do I love thee....      the endless box of delights where I can always find something to buy.   It is becoming something of a problem, I fear.   

And being addicted to all things Russian, I could not help but purchase this rather fine vintage Soviet army officer's bag for birthday boy Glen while I was at it...   turns out it is just the right size for his tablet laptop - joy!    (One day G may actually learn to speak Russian and that really will be the end of me!)