Monthly Archives: May 2011

Comment from: Boing Boing – Body slammed and choked by cops for dancing at Jefferson Memorial

“Can I suggest a new name for these kind of videos? Confrontation porn. Purposefully makes viewers hot and bothered.”

Spending a few days visiting my family; my Mum is still recovering from her operation and things aren’t going entirely smoothly – possible infection ahoy. Will be nice to keep her company for a while as she usually lives in an all male household… Plus, a bonus is that my Dad is going away on holiday on Tuesday and so I won’t get so pissed off quite as much. Woo.

I Need A Dollar
Aloe Blacc
Jools Holland 2010

Nice suit, nice moves, great voice.

Today I took Detective Crockett to school; it was the last day for Year 13 and as is traditional the kids and staff who taught them dress up.

This is me in my classroom at the end of the day.

I am astounded I kept so clean…

Sandwiches for dinner. De-lish… Crusty white rolls filled with smoked salmon and mature cheddar washed down with a glass of white wine. Simple greatness.

(Get A) Grip (On Yourself)
The Stranglers
from Rattus Norvegicus (1977)

fleet street fox – Do Not Read This

“Like a few other journalists, I’ve been sent a list of the current injunctions in the British courts…”

“It lists about 80 injunctions imposed since 2006. They include those already widely known – such as the footballer who had an affair with Imogen Thomas, the dumping of chemical waste by Trafigura, the one Zac Goldmith and Jemima Khan had against someone who hacked their emails, Fred Goodwin’s fling with a colleague while his bank burned and the one Andrew Marr has since broken himself about his affair and possible lovechild – as well as a few others that come as a surprise even to me.”

“Of those 80, eight strike me as completely fair. Two involve children, and three private individuals who simply want to stay that way. The sixth is about personal pictures found on a stolen laptop and the seventh is a private medical matter. The eighth is the Goldsmith injunction.”

“Thirty one involve extra-marital affairs. Three are about alleged blackmail, which does not seem to have been reported to the police. Three are aimed at shutting up former employees, and six at keeping former wives or cuckolded husbands quiet. Three specifically mention prostitutes and one appears to be about financial matters.”

YES.

via realMickFoley

EPIC.

LESS than epic:

Another wrestler dead at a (relatively) young age.

I Forgot To Be Your Lover
William Bell (1968)

This beautiful track popped into my head this evening whilst microwaving some curry.

But of course.

Bronze Sunrise by lrargerich [cc]

So the Head of Department job was finally advertised on that school’s website; as suspected they’re only interviewing after the 31st of May resignation deadline. So that’s that. In other news, I bought and tried out some bronzer.

Leia Ewok Village is sleeping on my floor this party weekend so I have major amounts of washing up and hoovering to do before her arrival on Saturday afternoon. At least tidying isn’t marking, though today we got a higher than expected number of A grades in our A Level group huzzah. We also got a FAIL which was unexpected.

Swings, roundabouts.

The coming weekend marks my first outing in the Crockett outfit to mark the double celebration of Caversham Princess and M making it to thirty whole years on the planet. I’ve been playing with hairstyles and considering what if any makeup I should wear; I was going to fake tan myself but i’m not sure I can quite cope with being orange. Might give a wash-off tan a shot, but then again i’d be worried that my beloved white suit would pick up some transfer.

Also, makeup with Crockett? I want to feel cool and bad-ass but with a bit of sexyness thrown in there at the same time. There is to be no fake stubble going on let me tell you. Would mascara and eyeliner turn into manscara and guyliner? Hmmm.

Off to Makeupalley I go: Hello bronzers…

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

“Track and Field” by Allora & Calzadilla. Some pretty interesting stuff here that grabs my eye and brain.

“Also included in the exhibit will be a 52-ton military tank turned upside down and topped with a treadmill and an Olympic runner.

‘It’s all about making the impossible possible,’ said Lisa Freiman, senior curator and chairwoman of the contemporary art department at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, who is this year’s commissioner of the pavilion. ‘I never thought the State Department would choose my proposal. I assumed it would be too politically engaged.'”

NYT War Machines (With Gymnasts)

Vanity Fair –
Elizabeth Taylor at a Florida “Fat Farm”

I love this photo; there’s something about the Polaroid saturated colour and slight softness to the image.

Just finished reading Furious Love, a blow-by-blow account of the many ups and downs of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

Whereas Jane Fonda spent her marriages trying to be whatever her husband envisioned, or embodying a “type” (Ingénue, Activist, Trophy Wife), Taylor sought men who would challenge her, stand up to her and try to dominate. Alpha Males were her thing and the phrase “Can’t live with them, can’t live without them” comes to mind as you read the travails of these two Alphas.

Some of the best things in the book were copies of the letters Burton would leave for Taylor to pass on his thoughts to her, even if she was in the other room; what true delight the man took in language. Taylor clearly had an enormous erotic hold over Burton and his writings reflect his desires to be subsumed by his “Jewish tart”.

“I lust after your smell and your paps, and your divine little money-box and your round belly and the exquisite softness of the inside of your thighs, and your baby-bottom and your giving lips and the half hostile look in your eyes when you’re deep in rut with your little Welsh stallion”

Mutual self-destruction abounded to the point where I found myself asking just how is it that a person can become so detached from reality, or form a reality that is so at odds with how the “rest” of us live. Folie à deux, perhaps?

Whilst Taylor lived in a manner that is mind-boggling even when compared to the footballers and Oligarchs of today, she had an uncanny ability to get on with a wide variety of people across differing social spheres. She would be the friend you knew would cross hell-and-high-water to help you, the go-to person when a crisis hits. So, she was detached from mere mortals yet curiously attuned.

Taylor was groomed for stardom from an early age and as such had learned to live in public privately, that is under a veil or in a bubble that protected her and prevented people from “getting in” so to speak. Burton did not have this protection and found himself struggling to live up to the role of Mr. Elizabeth Taylor.

Furious Love is very readable, however I found myself wanting a bit more detail in some parts, a feeling I did not get when reading Love Is Nothing or My Life So Far. It’s a bit more than an airport read and is indeed fascinating to be returned to a time when a celebrity could be condemned by the Vatican as “a woman of loose morals…”

Suede:
Stay Together (1994)
&
Beautiful Ones from Coming Up (1996)

Weird: Watching Ryan O’Reily coming to terms with his breast cancer in Season Two of Oz whilst my Mum spends the weekend in hospital recovering from her mastectomy and reconstruction.

I am hoping that the Head of Department job I mentioned previously will be advertised tomorrow so that I can get on with things; in teaching you have to resign your current position a half-term in advance so if I were to want to leave for a job starting in September I would have to hand my notice in by the 31st of May.

Given that nothing’s been advertised as of yet I am concerned that they won’t be interviewing before the resignation deadline and I do not want to resign and then find that I don’t get the job and am therefore unemployed. Ak.

Another *major* problem I foresee is that any interviews before half term will be at the same time me and my colleagues are marking the GCSE and A Level stuff; the schedule is so tight that I reckon I couldn’t be missed for even one day. It’s all basically one big clusterfuck, and the job hasn’t even been advertised yet. FFS.

This Is Love
PJ Harvey
from Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (2000)

It’s speculated that PJ Harvey inspired Nick Cave to write the previously posted song.

This song makes me feel like a bad ass and encourages me to put lipstick on before I go for a shower.

Sorry, Nick.

(Are You) The One That I’ve Been Waiting For
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
from The Boatman’s Call (1997)

A song to weep to/ A song that makes me weep.

Civil War Correspondent
John Parish & Polly Jean Harvey
from Dance Hall at Louse Point (1996)

So, back at the whiteboardface and I get an email yesterday from my old Head of Department at the boys school I did my teacher training at; she gave me the heads up about a job opening at a school that has a lot of potential- Head of Art at a grammar that is needing to be dragged into the modern age. School looks good, sensible policies about workload, good way to ease myself in to being an HOD – which I never thought i’d want to be – so all-in-all very promising.

BUT… the school is located in a small town that appears to have little that appeals- an hour away from London, one cinema, post-war estate housing, below Conference-level football, without a Wagamama, FIVE times smaller than where I live now. To further my career and possibly have a more satisfying job I would need to put my life outside work aside. I’d be living solo in a town that doesn’t even have a John Lewis. How would I survive???

On a more serious note… Moving to this new place would not be like exchanging hope about my personal life for satisfaction in my job, but at times over the last couple of days it seems like that. I think the small town is the sort of place that would be great if you’ve got a young family but for a single person I don’t know how much there is on offer. If I lived there would I come to regret moving for the sake of my job and then start resenting the job?

Anyway, I figure it would be a good challenge away from the norm to apply and see what happens. Trouble is, i’ve already been recommended to the Deputy Head by my former boss. Urk. However, as Leia Ewok Village says, “interviews are a two-way process” and she is totally right. Even if I did get offered the job I could turn it down and take the experience and confidence from it, gaining something that I might not have done if I don’t apply.

Argh to such decisions…

So, back to Mr. Orange on the warehouse floor.

Lets all get into a time machine and travel back to the depths of 2004 and the installation I created at the end of my degree. My final piece was a room carefully painted institutional green with a blood red band running around it; a wooden desk and vinyl-covered chair were provided alongside a grey metal filing cabinet. Inside the cabinet were a multitude of paper files documenting the injuries of fictional characters I had seen in films and on television over the course of time.

The focus on fictional male injury ran right through my degree, from the final piece, my business card that showed a bloodied and battered Joaquin Phoenix as the Emperor Commodus just as he was about to bite the dust, to photographs of the moments of cinematic maiming presented in book form.

I’ve spent a fair bit of time pondering where this interest in fake injury comes from but I haven’t managed to come up with anything concrete. My best guess is that it’s something to do with too much Han Solo and Indiana Jones at an impressionable age combined with a need to get close to powerful male figures who are incapacitated and therefore unable to hurt me. Thanks so much Dad for all your shitty parenting!

It could also be related to my affinity with powerful male characters and the sheer drama of something untoward happening to the man involved, their personal struggles the main focus, the lens capturing every desperate move they make.

Here’s how “it” works: Sometimes watching a character who is injured in some way I will become fascinated with what I see on screen. The room goes quieter as I direct all my attention into taking in the gashes, blood, stumbling, fight to stay alive; I can’t say i’m turned on in a standard watching/reading pornography sort of way, but my senses are heightened and I get an intense feeling of connection. A wounded man is something special, to be admired and fixated upon.

Saint Sebastian by Antonio Giorgetti at San Sebastiano fuori le mura, Rome

The best way to equate it with something less head-scratching would be when an attractive woman walks down a street and men stop what they’re doing and focus their attention on her various parts, her body, her walk, her clothes. Like everything stops so they can take it all in. They revel in her and that’s what I do, to men-in-peril.

Traumaphilia: “Arousal from wounds or trauma”

“Traumaphilia suggests an interest in the weakness of the body, always able to be damaged, torn, and mutilated.”

from Towards The Medical by Jack Sargeant

I have an interest in the medical but when it comes to real life peril and injury I am supportive and practical not pervy; perhaps this is because staged injury is “safe” and controlled and doesn’t involve anyone I care for, there’s a distance to it.

The image I had as a hy-uuuge poster on my bedroom wall when a teenager.

So, back to Mr. Orange.

Reservoir Dogs is probably the best example I can provide of what I find myself appreciating, an artistic high point so to speak. From the outset the viewer is confronted by a horrifying image of a man bloodied and writhing in agony after apparently having been shot at some point prior; there’s no escaping it unless the viewer averts their eyes: The blood smeared all over the vinyl upholstery of the car, spreading across his white shirt, his paling face, the confines of the interior.

I think I first watched Dogs as a mid-teen and I know this scene had an impact: The beauty in the red against the white, the heightened drama, the slow inevitability of blood loss as sure as sand trickles through an hourglass… Oh for pity’s sake would you listen to me- I’m trying my best to not over-embellish the gore but i’m not being entirely successful. Ode to Hypovolemia and Exsanguination indeed.

Aaaanyway, Mr. Orange’s short and über-bloody filmic existence was something that captured my interest when I first saw it and it has embedded into my brain. Back in 2003-2004 my technological abilities were not as good as they are today and so I wasn’t able to put into practise what I wanted to do: Re-edit Tarantino’s film so that it focused entirely on the travails of Mr. Orange. I then wanted to construct a loading ramp, dress up like Orange, douse myself in appropriate amounts of fake blood and then film myself copying Tim Roth’s performance, shot for shot.

Why would I pine to do this you ask? Hey, it would be art :) Again, I would refer back to this previous post on my affinity with male dynamism.

I don’t think I will ever do my mini-remake but what I have started work upon is the re-editing of the original. You know, instead of doing “actual” work. I’ve edited the film down to twenty-five minutes from ninety-nine; I think I will need to do a few versions to give greater emphasis to the beauty I see in the horror.

Yeah, so you already knew I was “different” Dear Reader…

For an as yet unascertained reason, today I was inspired to get to work on something I have been meaning to do for around ten years…

More later.