A PICTURE PAINTS A THOUSAND WORDS

Well, I haven't posted for a while but for good reason. In this situation the best thing to say is that a picture paints a thousand words and guess what... I just uploaded 283 new pictures to my Chinese Flickr album. That's right, 283,000 words, and if I tell you that the average fiction novel is about 80,000 words it will start to dawn on you that you're in for a treat.

What?! Fuck you! It's not laziness and no it's not just an attempt to fob anyone off so I can kick back with a whiskey and a cat, it's my way of letting you do some work, make up your own stories, you've got 283,000 new words to choose from, christ.

Well anyway, China ended with a bang, a massive cacophonous week long bang that' still ringing in my ears, I suppose that's why I'm shell shocked to be (somewhat) successfully functioning in Amsterdam.

Lots of updates coming up of new works including the large scale collage series, animations, installaions and a collaborative 300 page limited edition book! But in the meantime, use those words wisely .....

3rd July 2011

BETTER DESIGN, BETTER FUTURE

I'll be exhibiting my new work 'FROM I TO I' (more details on the work soon) in Xiamen, China from the 21st of May to the 4th of June 2011. On the 21st I'll also be  collaborating with Andrea Zavala Folache for another painting/soundscape performance during the opening of the exhibtion.

'Better Design, Better Future'

21st May - 4th June

No.95 Sports Road, Siming Area, Xiamen Art & Culture Center, China

21st May 2011

 LOOK AT ALL THESE PHOTOGRAPHS I TOOK I CHINA 

Every week I am literally inundated with an email asking to see more of my photos from China.

Well, Mr.Earl Boodle from Mexico City, Mexico, your prayer has been answered.

I've created an online flickr album that I will be regularly updating with photos of Chinese wrestling, dogs in bikinis and other general cultural differences  from all over China - just click here.

25th March 2011 

WORK, FOCUS & RADIATION?!

Right now I can't go outside because of radiation.

I'm not in Japan but I'm close-ish and because it's raining today, I've been advised to stay indoors with the doors and windows closed in case some radiation finds it's way into my pocket or socks and sneaks out when I'm sleeping and overturns all the condiments in my kitchen. Silly messy radiation.

I'm working on a series of collages that I'm planning on hanging and projecting upon for an exhibition at the beginning of next month. It's a pretty personal dive into my reasoning behind doing them in the first place, a pretty retrograde roundabout but it's a way for me to try and view things a like more objectively.
An appropriate analogy would be if you were doing hundred of little dots with a pen your face right in front of them, you can only see the the dots you're doing but not the bigger picture. I'm trying to take a step back and look at what the hell I'm doing by letting myself go and just doing anything that I feel is right, the equivalent of just bashing the keyboard and seeing if any words pop up hjgishdsgxxzxzvsdjesusiloveyoujejgjhkfj…
more news on that later probably. but here's a few in the works in progress…

I've also started writing a screen play for a short film I'm going to start making next month, here's a nonsensical extract -

'She happens across people walking in every way, sideways as if there was an invisible street beside here, people crossing into one another, passing through one another. A car goes through a man, it sweeps him away, the car falls down…. through the road, it seemingly continues down into a chasm, getting smaller and smaller.
She continues, she gets food, and pushes it to her body, it absorbs it.
Shot of nostrils, breathing, lungs, steps, 1, 2, 3.. lungs, animated, go into the bronchioles and alveoli.
She conjoins heads with people she passes, flash images of her conjoined with a boy on a bus.. back to her walking, conjoining heads along her way, the heads seem to pass into one another like siamese twins, the people seem to inhale more deeply when they do this, colours flash inside their heads, darts of paint, sometimes a person will drop to the ground after a connection. Their body will sink, dissolve into matter someone may join in to be dissolved.'

Last time I said I was in an exhibition. I did a drawing, painting performance set to an arrhythmic industrial soundscape with Andrea, it went well. We covered a wall in an hour and reacted to to the sounds and images that we were projecting onto us and the wall itself. It was an exercise in part, both Andrea wanted to something to limber us up before diving into a large project so our ideas crossed paths, she was exploring repetition in movement and I was looking into the mesmerics of repetition. The work itself is not the painting but the action of us creating the painting, some still of the video are below -

criscros 2010
And why the fuck is life governed by serendipitous moments that get upgraded from 'moments' to 'the way life is now'. Andrea needed to renew her visa and so asked a girl where it may be. This girl turned out not to be just the best English speaker we've happened across in China, but she's obsessed with Spain. Hold on, isn't Andrea Spanish? Yes, yes she is. So this girl has pictures of the Spanish prince and princess on her wall at home and just luuuurves Penelope Cruz. What are the chances? Now she's going to take us climbing.

In other China news -
I love honey
Bag shops play bangin' music
Supermarkets play a lot of Ronan Keating & Blue
If all the biscuits in the world came to life, could they overthrow humanity?

6th -18th March 2010

 HYPERREALITY, HOLISTIC MISFIRES & A POEM ABOUT NICHOLAS CAGE

One week ago I finally realised that I was in China.

It's an incredible latency period of a month and a half but nevertheless it hit me with a wallop. I was walking to the bus stop after teaching some Chinese children how to speak English (more on that later) and I was suddenly struck how fuzzy the air was. I looked up to examine the cause of this sweet breeze and I stopped dead in my tracks. It was a view I'd seen for a month and a half but for the first time, I really 'saw' it - in the distance was the familiar veil of mist that covers the rolling dark green mountainous slopes, and lodged within them were dots of little white and terracotta houses. In front of all of them was a huge pagoda-esque building with those swept lines that create such identifiable roofs but doubled with striking beautiful colours of deep greens and yellows, I was taken aback. How had I only noticed where I was until now? Even more in the foreground were dozens of Chinese people and they're a dead giveaway.

Hyperreality sometimes takes hold and decides that it has prime place over regular reality. It means that flying across the earth and living in China is 'taken for granted', hyperreality saps the excitement from adventure because it's too unbelievable to be believed so therefore, it doesn't even try.
Hyperreality is a bastard, it switches the mind off when things get too much, it blocks off the stimulation flood gates and bypasses all information to the cerebellum so you don't become a jellyfish. A lack of a firm grip on reality feels like I'm floating through this experience without emotional responses to stimuli but… every now and then, my feet touch the ground and my sensory perception soaks in it's surroundings.
I finally 'know' where I am. It feels sublime.

Despite being a zombie most of the time, I write down a lot of things almost subconsciously, like my subconscious knows and appreciates where it is even though the conscious mind decides that 'performing' basic functions like using chopsticks is more important than realising 'why' it is using those chopsticks.
This is an unfiltered stream of 'I don't know what', perhaps a third person view may be able to make sense of some of these ramblings -

 A mouthful of events there is fish frying in my moustache passive Viewing you are/is a good girl always leaving a residue getting fat to get fat Yû Jackie Chan cooks people what fat For forward me row mount vaccine isolatory infintesimilism 1 dot space Fuh.Q max is there where you need him crotch thrusting poster quasi transient peregrination selling nuts to an octopus leaving the porridge for the good times two buns for breakfast what is to what it should be

 A representation of their Englsih teacher as coloured by four 6 year olds

 I need money to be able to buy noodles and to subsist my existence so I've started teaching four 6 year old Chinese children how to speak English. Now i can't speak any Chinese and they sure as heckins can't speak any English so it's tricky to teach to say the least.

It's two 1½ lessons each week and let me tell you, no six year old child can sustain a steady stream of attention to a long faced white foreigner for more than 50 minutes. They're sweet but nuts; they boys keep kung-fuing each other and throwing ashtrays at each others heads (true) and at one point in the last lesson, they all ran away and all had a wee, but not in the toilet oh no! They just had wees in the open park where we were sitting, they all went to separate but equally open ares of the park and just had a wee wee. I never thought I'd be teaching Chinese children English but I also didn't think I'd live in Amsterdam or be eating eel stuffed frogs.

Bought a twin pack of Snickers that came with one free AAA battery, bonus!

 Anyway, there is only one face I can see from my kitchen here in Xiamen, only one massive solitary face whilst I cook, it belongs to none other than weirdy beardy, recedey weedy , toothily grinny, droll talkin', put the bunny down Nicholas Cage. He's advertising a watch or something on a gigantic poster half a mile away but yeah can I see that pearlsome grin from here. So as I stated in the title of this post, here is a poem about Nicholas Cage -

Nicholas Nicholas
Oh how you tickle us

Your vacant grin
That sits on your chin
And those two dull eyes
Say you've died inside

Oh it's so nice be looking'
At your gurn as I'm cookin'
Here in ma kitchen
Oh how it's bitchin'

Nicholas Nicholas
Oh how you tickle us

So fickle for a tickle
Mr.Nicholas Pickle
I want to nibble your dibble
Because I enjoyed Con Air when I was about 14

On the next post I shall write about the live painting/ drawing performance I did last night with Andrea and how we were lifted above the heads of about 19 people and carried through the streets of Xiamen as everyone chanted 'Crease! Crease! Crease!'.

22nd February - 5th March 2011

 THIS IS HAPPENING TODAY

Me - "Cor, I really want some rice."
Andrea - "Yeah me too."
Me - "Oh look, that man has rice"

*As I say this, the man throws up his rice.

Peeooow, Shanghai comes to an end but not without many more serendipitous occurrences. On New Years Eve, we wanted to spend our time immersed in the fried arms of a native Chinese family to study the behavioural patterns of a close family unit on a special occasion. Some families only come together once a year but regardless of distance, they do come together with gold and red gifts in tow by the cart full. There's a ritualesque narrative to their dinners and gift exchanging ceremonies, one that Andrea & I wanted to view and re-tell in a fly on the wall way for our ingoing project 'Lookatic'; a dissection of idiosyncrasies from nations/communities/kinsfolk around the world.

Unfortunately and unsurprisingly did not manage to cross the threshold into a new unbeknownst world but as a consolation prize, we spent our new year's dinner with a Shanghai Policewoman called Sofia who took us to a dumpling place.
We kept in touch and ending up going on a couple of day trips with her, first to Jzhujia Corner (deemed the Venice of China) ((I deem it not)) where we ate 'bean curd' or as I like to call it, 'bean turd'.

We went to 'Happy Valley' two days later, a theme park like any other except this one was packed to the rafters with Chinese looking people apart from two, tall, white europeans wearing pink rabbit hats. Most rides were as you'd expect, loops, swoops and poops but one in particular was phenomenally bad; you sat in these bucket seats and had a large hydraulic harness hugging you like a plane with it's wings. I expected mayhem, all this machinery doubled with safety precautions meant danger. The rows of seats rose, slowly and ominously but rather than leading on to a track or path, they just hung statically in mid air facing an IMAX screen. On the screen appeared a dragon, it flew all over China, the seats were lowered and we all got out and went outside. We left Shanghai for an 8 train ride to the sub-tropical south of China feeling composed and full ¡Vamos a Xiamen!

 3rd - 8th February 2011

TURNS OUT THE CHINESE REALLY DO MAKE THE BEST FIREWORKS 

(or were they good becasue they went off next to my face?)

 1 = Ancillary Information

2 = Indispensably Bloody Mandatory Information

1. Right, let's get these cool but auxiliary pieces of information out of the way in pithy nugget sized bullet points: Load cartridge, cock it, fire -

•Made friends with a policewoman
•Went to a theme park with her today and wore pink rabbit hats
•In the middle of doing a very very fun fashion shoot
•Got an obligatory fake Cartier
•Leaving Shanghai to live in Xiamen for 5 months tomorrow
•Ate cubes of bean sick and a packet of flowers
•Did Chinese 3D IMAX
•My favourite and most used camera Minolta X-9 broke at a time of need, happened across an X-700 in serendipitous circumstances, problem solved
•Prayed in a temple
•Compared my hair to actual Chinese babies, it's identical
•Shanghai is secretly ruled by children, babies and puppies

 2. The Meat -

As I sit here consuming noodles, apples and beer in my cheapsio hotel room in Shanghai, there is a full scale war going on outside. The sound emanating from this city is akin to that of live gunfire, large explosions and general apocalyptic mayhem.

Chinese New Year is happening right now and what I can hear and see are fireworks and bloody plenty of them. The din is relentless, it's been 5 hours since todays round began and it shows no sign of stopping. A thick veil of smoke lingers around your vision like swimming underwater and the air clings to the walls of your throat with the pungency gunpowder.
It feels amazing.

The new year began at 12am on the 3rd of February and I wanted to be in the thick of it so I went to the roof of my hotel, 18 storeys up. The fireworks started even-tempered enough but come bang on 12 I was sandwiched between lightning, fire, thunderous explosions and pure bedlam. Fucking hell it was one of the most incredible experiences of my life, I was 18 storeys up and funnily enough, that's about the height that fireworks explode at. It's the inner city and people have nowhere else to set off fireworks than inbetween tower blocks and skyscrapers so 'PZZZZIIIIIOOWWW', up they went, crashing into the building in their way up and 'BKOOOOOAAARRRXXXXX!!!', they exploded next to windows, on the side of buildings and right next to my head.

Now I'm not exaggerating here or embellishing this story for dramatic effect but they exploded next to my head and the only thing stopping my face from being blown off like dirty man in a toilet cubicle was a plate of glass that I ducked behind every now and then. Yeeeooow wow it was exhilarating, they were detonating on front, behind and on top of me, I was yelping and running around due to excitement mainly but also to avoid the occasional burning debris coming my way. Have you ever seen fireworks up that close? No, of course not, not even scientists have you idiot, I'm special.

The power some of things produce is phenomenal, especially the whoppers; shock waves pierced the atmosphere and could be felt all over my body, my irises melted into pools of liquid black at the explosive climax and my face lit up with every colour under the sun in pure ultrasonic sight.

FFFFFFFFfffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffXOZKXOZKXOZXOZ

XOKOQKOQXKOQKOZXOZKXOZKXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXOZXOZXOKOZZZZZZQKOQX

KOQKOZKKKKZZHHHHHHHHSSSHHHHH

...

Let me deliquesce….

1st-7th February 2011

MASS EXODUS, HUSTLING, BALDNESS  & POO

 Mum, I smoke now in order to blend in (I also wear a balaclava) ((Oh, and I'm also bald now))

It's traditional to have your haircut before New Year so I had mine cut like a Chinese baby (but it ended up a bit more Bickle than I'd hoped).

Right, wow, right... Chinese New is fast approaching and the greatest human migration on earth is currently taking place. Basically the Chinese celebrate their New Year at the start of February each year and this year it falls on the 3rd. It's traditional to go home and spend New Year with relatives and take back plenty of gifts, most people living and working in Shanghai have family in the country or outside of the city so thousands upon hundreds of thousands take part in this exodus but all those people also buy bucket loads of stuff (sweets/ meat/ clothes/ computers/ showerheads) here before they go.

The atmosphere here is insane, it's frantic and hysterical. I went to Tiantong road to a gargantuan array of shop/markets/stalls where they sell mass amounts of fake clothes etc. There are no white people there, only Chinese, it's Chinese for Chinese and it's only a few days until new year and people need to get back home so what do they do? They frantically buy buy buy, they scream, push, throw, it's unbelievable; everyone's doing last minute buying and the shops need to get rid of their stuff before New Year because everyone will be gone by then so what ends up happening is that all the prices are cut by about 60% plus the Chinese bargain down anything so all items end up being 85% cheaper but the kicker is that the products were dirt cheap to start with so the final prices are literally next to nothing.
When I was there a bunch of the sellers took their shops outside, they went out into the freezing weather and were just screaming prices and people were crowding like zombies round clothes and shoes that were on the floor, people were clambering and scrambling, yeesh, mental.

Whilst standing at the Tiantong market waiting for a woman to stop shouting at Andrea about some shorts, a man approached me asking if I wanted girls. I said 'Um…' and he said that they were very good. I told him I had to ask Andrea first as a ploy to escape his protitutey tendrils but when I came back to tell him that she said no, he told me my girlfriend was very beautiful and I should marry her, I thanked him. He then said I should still get some prostitutes, he pointed at my chest as if they were some Chinese prostitute breasts and said 'big, then he touched my bum and said 'big' and then pointed at the genitals and said 'small' to which he and his partner roared with laughter. Anyway, I ended up following him to a far off closed region of the market where there weren't any police to look at some fake Rolexes but I got scared when  about 7 men cornered me shouting prices so I ran away fearing a mugging.

The subways in Shanghai are immaculate and gleaming. Each station is a white canvas adorned and divided by black vectors, something to behold.
This was juxtaposed by a man holding up his child who was shitting in the bin though. 

The area in which I currently reside is the best in Shanghai, Nanpu and surrounding roads. It's one of the few ares left in central Shanghai that's not been modernised and thus it's residents retain their sensibilities. Round here they chop the heads off chickens the street, drink fresh sugar cane, sell one pair of boots and nothing more, wear the most extraordinary items, sell unidentifiable but delicious (and disgusting) foods. Everything and every body is dirty but they're happy, and so am I.

Got offered to have a karaoke booth for ¥100 that could be filled with girls, the man that told me this took me up to the bar (via a backway lift in a shopping centre) at 5.30pm and said that both Andrea and I should start drinking now. The card he gave me had girls in bikinis on it but the bar was empty and scary. We went back at 10 to see if we could still fill that booth with bikini clad girls but it was still both scary and empty and they were closed the shopping centre beneath so fearing yet another mugging, I didn't stay.

Rode on the back of a farty mans motorbike who drove on the street and ended up driving so close to other vehicles that Andrea smashed and cut her hand. It was worth it though (we both agree), he drove fun. (he nearly ran over a businessman)

Bought an iphone from a very very dodgy market (very). The guy selling it to us (Mark.J) tried initially to flog a garage opening remote control or something and when we were halfway on the other side of the market he ran over and said that he could also get an iphone. To cut a long story short, it's an old one, you can't update it and I had to go back to get it unlocked after itunes decided it was a bad egg. So Mark Marky with his one grotesquely long finger nail scowled at me and said he wouldn't fix it so I shouted at him and his partner (business, partner, not lady partner) and they shouted back until their Mafioso boss walked past (because despite all the sellers having separate stalls, their all working together and all working for on big boss) and they just went pale and silent and relented to fixing the phones. But hey, after all the shouting died down, a news crew interviewed me for Shanghai live news about the tax on ipads on which I am an expert, that was fun.

Toilet times: Didn't go for a week, got worried so I wen to a pharmacy and tried to ask for 'assistance' if you know what I mean. Do you know how hard it is to ask for laxative without speaking Chinese?! Gesticulations are hard enough without being crass and the last thing you want to do is introduce a sound element. Eventually however, in a crowded pharmacy, one woman caught my drift and with a huge smile she enthusiastically signaled with her hands the actions of poo coming out of her bum with, she was about 50 and was wearing a pharmacy lab coat.
Well, the stuff she gave me didn't work so I went to another place and somehow, without saying too much, another woman in the middle of a supermarket started to act out the same gesture of poo copiously coming out of her bum, she guffawed endlessly as she handed over the Aloe pills that had a tagline of 'Make Your Beauty Come To Life' and underneath it said, and I quote the packaging here, 'Moisturize Intestine andPromote Defeacation'.
I spent the next couple of days on the toilet.

I have observed these traits in Chinese culture so far - farting, burping, spitting, shouting, chopsticks, eating lot, jelly, chicken feet and altruism.

Oh yeah, blogspot doesn't bloody work, that's why I'm on here now and I can't show any pictures despite shooting nearly a roll of film a day because nowhere will develop it due to the Spring Festival. So we'll have to wait and see the vast array of tasty snaps and I assure you, they will be bountiful. (The words 'tasty' and 'bountiful' made me think of Bountys)

24th-31st January 2011

HIGH ON SHANG

23rd January 2011

(I googled to see if that joke was too common to use and it turns out that only the New York Times has used it to promote a Chinese chef in New York which makes me much wittier than I'm given credit for) 

Arrived in Shanghai (...China); Knackered.

Sleep... please..

thank you....

(quick insight... Chinese people are wonderful, Russian women are not)

DRUNK IN MOSCOW

22nd January 2011

Weren't allowed to leave the airport in Moscow so we whiled away the time by drinking champagne and eating baby chocolates.
(for 15 bloody hours)

 WE SET OFF FOR HALF A YEAR TO CHINA

21st January 2011