Life drawing class in Hackney

On the relative normality of a quiet day in Nathanworld, I went to life drawing class on Monday. It was upstairs in a pub in Hackney/Homerton. The class leader is a mad drunkard, who laughs like a Machievallian baddie in a Hammer film. There are two pub cats, one of which joined the art class!

Gentlemen, a word of advice…

… Never keep your condoms in your breast pocket. Why? I'll tell you. After a few jolly days on the beach and splendid evenings in fine and quirky hostelries, I took the train back from Brighton to London. There are engineering works on the line and a replacement bus service to Three Bridges. My flowery bag and guitar and I are in close proximity and in facing seats with a very pretty, and gawky/lanky 18 year old girl and her mother. The seating arrangement lends itself to conversation. The girl and I keep touching bare knees - she is in a beautiful flower print cotton summer dress, and I in shorts. It means nothing, but feels very intimate, something that means nothing with friends, but slightly offends the British reserve with strangers. We are talking together. The girl sneezes in a fit of hayfever. Being a gentleman, I offer her my handkerchief with a flourish. However, there are condoms in my breast pocket too and these fly out and land in her lap. Not one, not two, not three, but four of them. The condoms are in purple wrappers that look like blackcurrant sweets. I see her flash of realisation and a quick sideways glance at her mum. Her mum is looking out of the window. The girl discreetly covers the condoms with her hand, blows her nose and cleverly hands the handkerchief and the condoms back to me together without her mum seeing. Every time we make eye contact we are in fits of giggles all the way to Three Bridges. Much to the annoyance of her mother.

Pre School Tea Party Massacre

Preschool Tea Party's Drop it Asshole: I'm lovin' it. You can download the album for free. Find it and do so, it's brilliant.

Myspace

Myspace, a room where your favourite record is always playing. You can put up all your favourite pictures. A place where your best friends permanently hang out. You can hear the echo of recent and current conversations. The bulletin radio tells you when your mate's sister's brother's half-uncle's band is playing next.

Myspace, like a student house with creaky boards and uneven walls. There is a dripping tap in the kitchen and a missing doorknob. Everybody's room is painted unalike. Some rooms are redecorated every week. People put pictures up and take them down; move them and give them to friends and share music.

Myspace, the rent is cheap from the media mogul landlord. The vast corridors of 'myspaces' of slightly substandard and shabby structure. Every now and then something pops and you get lost. A wall goes up where you once beat a familiar path to a friend's door. You have to find a different wonky staircase up to the floor.

Myspace, you can leave your door open, or shut it to yourself and your exclusive friends, but you can't escape the flickering neon lights above you. You get used to it and ignore it soon enough, of course. You never stop wondering at the architect of this eyesore of a construction. Why did they build the windows so weird?

Myspace, you know you will leave someday. Maybe you'll pack up your stuff, or just trash the place before you go. Maybe you will get yourself a second life? Or, maybe you will move to the real world where the you can scrape your real knuckles on the uneven wood chip walls. Taste the real sweet air while playing your favourite record in the park.

Entertainment in Reading

I was thinking of going to Reading to see some friends there. I checked out the Reading Council web site for events. These are the top six events on the council site. I decided not to visit, it looks too scary there.

Peter's Bike

At the junk shop, the Chopper bicycle lay
Leant on a busted table, where knives and spoons bend
and one eyed dollies play
And kitchenettes and dusty mirrors and
chandeliers with missing slivers
So, back to the bike
leant on the busted table
We pass it and admired it
everyday on the way home from school
We patted the seat and squeezed the brakes
The bike was really cool

One day, coming home with his mum,
Peter pauses to peruse
the sparkling spokes, the banana saddle
the three gears from which to choose
'You like the bike, don't you Peter'
'Yes, mum', said Peter, who, as usual
was chewing the cuff of his sweater

In the sunlight
leaning on a secondhand door
Penfold, the junk shop owner
smiles a tacit smile, when
Peter's mum said to Peter,
'Well, the bike is yours'

©mm7 nathan jones

Ethical shopping

If… illegal so called recreational drugs were legal, one would be able to make an ethical choice about were and what to buy. Cocaine and weed could be fairtrade and organic. Those farmers in Colombia would appreciate not having machine guns stuck in their faces if they attempt to grow food crops, I'm sure.

Ecstasy and LSD could be hallmarked to show purity. Also, your e's would not arrive to your mouth via a condom up someone's bum as is sometimes the case. And people, do read up on your drugs. I'm amazed at the amount of people who bang on about their bananas supporting the Dominican economy, or boycott certain animal food products due to inhumane treatment fail to do a little research on the recreational drugs they neck carelessly at the weekend. MDMA, or Ecstasy was synthesised by the Nazis in WWII and tested on prisoners as part of a wider range of horrific medical experiments. That is just one example.

OK, rant over. On a lighter note, this is a documentary of British troops experimenting with LSD. This is my kind of war…

Catch 22

Random postcards

The random postcard project entailed choosing a number from 1-100 and emailing it in. In return for the number, you receive a word. This word is then illustrated on a postcard and sent in.

Tonight was the private view. It was a quiet little affair, but the gallery space is lovely. Homestead Gallery is in St. John's Street, Clerkenwell. There is a café bar that serves vodka and scrambled eggs. The seating is all old seventies spce age looking dining sets - all different. There is a record shop where you can help yourself to headphones and a record player and listen to music.

Here are a couple of my postcards, you can see the rest here:

Random postcards

Oh my goodness, there is a picture of my mum winning the typographic quiz on there too…

Are people really that stupid?

I am working in a shop this week. I have the shop to myself and I'm chilling out with some records on. During the day, the front door is kept locked and operates on a buzzer. The amount of people who push the door and walk away amazes me. Even if I wave, they just walk away. Sometimes, later in the day, people pull the door and think it is locked - and just walk away. They don't even bother to try and push it. The shop lights are on and there is music playing. The shop looks 'open'. Surely opening a door is a pretty basic cognitive function? How many options are there? Push or pull. Then, the variables - shop open, shop closed.

A friend works as a night porter in a guest house. He recently mentioned the lack of basic ability in many guests using the swipe card door locks. From his little office, he sees guests returning at 4am, swiping the outside door and just staring at the door. They don't even bother to push. Then they leave and probably sleep in a gutter on the streets of Liverpool with a broken bottle as a pillow.

A surreal hour

Today I sold a pair of shoes. An odd pair of shoes. I got them mixed up as I had a lot of shoes out. The customer left with two left shoes I discovered the error when I went put the display pair back and they just didn't look right. Well they did. Two right.

I put the Oh Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack on the record player as I giggled to myself about the man with two left feet. Two bible bashers from the Hardcore Catholic's R Us building over the road came in. They are easy to spot. They wear short sleeved white shirts with a shiny name badge and never smile. In the the highways, in the hedges went those squeaky girls on the record whilst my austere friends browsed.

I took note of a 'foreign' accent and asked the guy were he was from. Texas, he replied. Ah, so this stuff must be right up your street, then? I said pointing a thumb at the speakers. I think… I've heard this song before, came the reply. The other guy chirped in, I'm not from Texas, I'm from Tunbridge Wells in Kent! Feeling conversational, I respond: I know it well, and Rye too, such a beautiful place. To which the Wellsian fellow almost smiled, then went blank and stared intently at his top button. The Texan asked me about a T shirt in the window from a week ago. It said Morningwood on it, the Texan said. The T shirt in question was a tongue in cheek pun on what is more commonly known (in the UK at least) morning glory. For the 52% who don't experience it, it is waking up with a hard on. A uniquely delightful experience of the male subsection of the species. Anyway, the Texan was rather crestfallen that the T shirt had been sold and they both left the shop.

I pondered the meaning of the Texan Crusader wanting a smutty T shirt, whilst I chewed cashew nuts. The thing I really don't understand is what the can of lighter fuel he was holding was for.

Moments later, a nuclear family came in. Mother, father, daughter and son - the other .4 seemed to be floating around their heels somewhere. Skinny Tees? asked the mother. They chose a rather nice yellow T shirt with green screen printed graphics of a girl riding a rodeo horse and waving a lasoo. The words Drugstore Cowgirl were written around the picture. The young boy (maybe 9?) tried it on and it fiited perfectly and looked good. They bought it and the boy left the shop with the T shirt on.

Two left shoes, T shirts with sexual references to bible bashers and Drugstore Cowgirl T shirts for a boy. Damn, I'm good.

Anyone want two right shoes?

Meanwhile, on Tooting High Street…

David Shrigley

The man is far too popular for his own good, but he brings refreshing insight (and myopic neurosis) into the mundane. Nowhere more dazzlingly so than here… (poke his name, above)

Beans on toast

Beans on toast

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Breakfast of Champions

Kurt Vonnegut is vonnegone
venny voz ere ee voz vonnegood
venny voz gone it voz verrysad

Pictures of vonnebottoms
pictures of vonnearses
Kilgore Trout spouts gutless wonder
Diane Moon Glooper, god bless your vonnewater

Vonnegut, you'll be missed a vonnelot

Art

Every time I try to do some art someone tells me to stop making a mess.

Detour

Told in flashbacks, Detour is the tragic tale of Al Roberts (Tom Neal), a New York nightclub pianist who hitch hikes to Hollywood to be with his girl Sue (Claudia Drake) who is has left to become a Hollywood star.

Al gets a lucky ride and the slightly shady Mr Haskell (Edmund MacDonald) is going all the way to LA. Well, Mr Haskell dies mysteriously and Al takes the car and assumes Haskell's identity. Unlucky for Al, a woman, he picks up at a gas station, Vera - played by the ferocious Ann Savage - turns out to have been romantically involved with Mr Haskell. The plot descends into a spiral of blackmail and murder.

Tom Neal is a little hammy in this, but it kind of works, especially when Ann Savage's Vera starts to tear him apart.

The film was made in just six days. An incredible feat when you see it, despite a few loose ends in the story. There is a certain gritty realism in retrospect. Tom Neal was a real rough guy. He served six years for manslaughter after his third wife died after being shot in the head.

This is without a doubt Ann Savage's finest role. She burns through the role like a spitting, hissing caged cat. Savage set a whole new standard of femme fatale in this fim.

The film is out of copyright and available as a reasonable quality download from www.archiveclassicmovies.com

Passport to Pimlico (1948)

Passport to Pimlico is one of the best of the Ealing comedies. Set in Pimlico, London during a summer heatwave. A building site is discovered to have an unexploded bomb underground (the film being made not long after WWII when London was still recovering from its battering by bombs). The bomb goes off accidentally and an Alladin's cave of treasure is found in the crater. The wonderfully batty Molly Reed, played by the equally batty Jane Hylton is the history expert who verifies the loot as belonging to the Earl of Burgundy.

One thing leads to another and Pimlico becomes an autonomous nation called Burgundy. Stanley Holloway who plays Arthur Pembleton - a grocery shopkeeper, becomes Prime Minister.

The script is sharp and typical of Ealing. Seeing the amiable working class of Pimlico taking on the mild buffoonery of Whitehall.

"We always were English and we always will be English - and it is just because we are English that we are sticking up for our rights to be Burgundians"

I wondered about the film location - featuring a raised overground railway in the background (which doesn't exist in Pimlico). The film was actually made in Lambeth, just to the other side of the river from Pimlico. The railway is actually the line between Vauxhall and Waterloo. A sharp eye can spot Hercules Road and Sail Street from the train and see where the film was made.

The film is now out of copyright and available (along with other great movies) as a reasonable quality download from: www.archiveclassicmovies.com.

Olympic tea pouring competition

My grandmother was multi skilled sportswoman. Not only did she ride Irish ponies, but was Childwall Bowls champion too. If that wasn't illustrious enough, she could also - using her special competition teapot, pour a cup of Lady Grey from the height of 1.2 metres without spilling a drop.

I propose tea pouring at Olympic level. The tea pouring contest could then be followed by the biscuit dunk. This would be divided into sprint, medium distance and endurance. The sprints would take place with Jaffa Cakes - contentious maybe as they are called cakes and not biscuits. This would just add to the excitement. Next, digestives and finally the real test of stamina would take place with Rich Tea biscuits. In an experienced hand, these biscuits have been known to stay dunked for a full 45 seconds without breaking off and sinking into the murky depth of a cup of milky Ceylon.

Lastly, I'd like to propose solo synchronised swimming. This would entail splashing around in a pool and saying, "Lookatmelookatmelookatme". Whoever could do this most effectively would be the winner.

Blenheim Crescent

Easter egg hunt

Easter starts waking me up on Danny's sofa. The glorious dusty light singing an aria into my sleepy eyes. Last night Dannny, Stephanie and I put away five bottles of sparkling wine - we fripped Freixenet, we caned the Cava and we licked the Lindauer. Stephanie and Billy arrive with excited and noisy kids in tow. "Sorry I crashed out early - I was a bit woozy and went to bed", said Stephanie. "Steph, I puked in your flowerbed, don't worry about it", I reply cheerfully.

Beastly Beaster

Beaster Beastly Brown Bunnies Bounce Badly Behind Badger's Big Bop Barn
Badger's Bribed, Bronwyn's Broke, Bromine's Brown, Bunnies Beastly
Beastly Brown Bunnies Break Badger's Big Bop Barn
Badger Baits Beastly Brown Bunnies Back
Bunnies Bore Badger Bribed
Badger's Big Bushels Beastly Brown Bunnies Bunked
Badger Bares Big Black Balls, Beats Beastly Brown Bunnies
Black, Blue Beastly Brown Bunnies
Bleak Black Bold Badger Barrow Been Bought
Big Bad Badger Boils Bunnies Become Bold
Beastly Brown Beaster Bunnies Badger Baits Bid
Bye Bye

© mm7 nathan jones

Last of the Romanoffs

Her Imperial Highness was born to the Imperial Russian family of Saint
Petersburg in 1905, but was almost immediately hidden away on the orders
of the Czar due to her startling mane of red hair.

Regina Fong is the alter ego of Reginald Sutherland Bundy. The plaque is at the Black Cap pub in Camden. I can recommend the food. It is reasonably cheap and better than your average pub meal. Do not drink the water from the flower vases on the bar as the staff get upset.

Jane's Birthday

Palace of the Bitches