Saturday 28 February 2015

Gagarin

It must be about 10 years since I first learned of Yuri Gagarin, the first man to orbit the Earth, when studying the play 'Gagarin's Way' at uni. Written by Gregory Burke, the play tells the story of a factory robbery gone wrong. Set in a mining town in Fife and named after a street that exists in real life, in Lumphinnans, that was named after the cosmonaut in the 1960s as an indication of the level of respect shown by the town's council and community to socialist Russia.

Fast-forward to 2015 and we have this:



This just in from the benefits of the space race:
The All-Russian Exhibition Center, the famous general trade exhibition center in Moscow, commonly referred as VDNKh, will begin to sell authentic cosmonaut food packed into toothpaste-style tubes, starting Friday.

Visitors of All-Russian Exhibition Center (VDNKh) will have a chance to try a full-course cosmonaut menu, including four kinds of soups, various meat dishes and a variety of deserts. According to organizers, there will be 11 variations of tubes, each tasting like a different kind of food.

Read more: http://sputniknews.com/art_living/20150205/1017833052.html#ixzz3RROE6lca

Oh, and Gregory Burke's still working - he wrote '71, which looks ace.

Sunday 22 February 2015

The Blue Nile: Glasgow outlawed guitars

Hearing The Blue Nile on the radio recently reminds me of the excellent Allan Brown biography of the band, Nileism.



Facts about 1970's/80's Glasgow I learned from this book:
- Rock music performances were banned by the city council. It happened in 1956 and ran until 1976, was made possible by centralised ownership of venues, and was in response to concerns about bands corrupting the city's youth. We know how this ends.


Tuesday 17 February 2015

Friday 13 February 2015

Espada

A plastic fish floats
on a wide black puddle,
its soy sauce belly pumped.

The green muzzle holds in city air
but we’re miles from the ocean.
Sayonara, sucker.

Tuesday 10 February 2015

Missed Connections

Sometimes it takes me a long time to clock what an artist might have been doing. What follows is an example.

I picked up a pamphlet called Elucidations in the CCA in Glasgow in August, it contains two essays by a Norwegian philosopher and mountain-namer I'd never heard of, Peter Wessel Zapffe.

Zapffe writes, in 'The Last Messiah': -

Sunday 8 February 2015

Warhol and Morris

Jeremy Deller's done a great job putting together the exhibition at Modern Art Oxford,
it made me want to do this.

Wednesday 4 February 2015

Ampersand

(painting a funeral director's sign)

Maybe the Finns have it right,
put all the facts in your name:
your dad, your rank, your billing address.

The paintbrush follows
the curve of her back
and the arm reaching to protect.

The mother with the strained neck, eating;
the baby dragging its padded bottom;
the mathematical symbol for yoga.

It says that what comes after
belongs to what came first,
as those eyes of yours
move to the next line.

&