Be an artist

Look at the people on the bus and create something new out of the parts of people in sight: -
a best dressed person
a worst dressed person
the most attractive composite person
the best lookalike
most likely to have a musical talent
your secret parent
your preferred kidney donor
your childhood sweetheart all grown up
your champion should your honour need defended
the one you would distrust in a post-apocalyptic scenario

Millennials

'Why didn't you pick up the phone? Is it harder with your new hand?'
'I was practicing my lightsabering.'
'Do you mean lightsaber fighting?'
'I mean I was swishing my long laser blade'
'-dong laser blade'
'... around to practise using it. Yes, for fighting. What else do you do with a lightsaber?'
'I dunno, cut cheese?!'
'If I was using it to cut cheese I would have said that I was having cheese - the light saber and whether it was sliced or not would be unnecessary background detail.'
'Fine. So why didn't you pick up the phone?'
'You know that some things are more difficult for me since MY HAND WAS CUT OFF. I needed to be completely aware of my physicality, to tap into the Force to better myself as a combatant - I do not seek distractions. The prosthetic is very useful but -'
'Yeah but, why didn't you use the Hans Free?'
'Is that a joke? Did you make a joke about my hand being CUT OFF and our friend being FROZEN IN CARBONITE and taken from us by the powers of evil?!'
...
'I'm sorry to have made light of it, and I'm sorry for making you feel uncomfortable before - I know you like me but I like Hans. I've lost Hans too... Has anyone ever told you that you're hand-some when you're angry?'

[the bubbles in Leila's carbonated drink start to pop prematurely as if controlled by an unseen force set on making it go flat]

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.

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.

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': -