VETERANS OF DISORDER

Advertiser's Announcement #1: Homage to Claire Churchill, (1967)

 

 Advertiser's Announcement #2: The Angle Between Two Walls, (1967)

 

Advertiser's Advertisement #3: A Neural Interval, (1968)

Advertiser's Announcement #4: A Placental Insufficiency, (1970)

Advertiser's Announcement #5: Venus Smiles, (1970)

Ordering back copies of Ambit magazine from a draughty warehouse in Cambridgeshire. Have officially joined Sealed Knot of earlier, better wars.

 

(J.G. Ballard's Advertiser's Announcements, Ambit magazine, 1967 - 1970, via Ballardian)

YOUR BODY'S LIKE A CAMEMBERT / OOZING FROM ITS SKIN

THE ROCKY NEST IN PICTURES

I recently shot Hull band The Rocky Nest in a sandpit on Hull Marina:

Alternative Three (1977)

Via Ballardian

Most of the ‘art’ we hear about today is fashion driven by commerce. Money is just a means of exchange, a means of keeping a roof over your head and all that, but to pursue wealth for its own sake is decadent. I agree with Samuel Beckett that one has to teach oneself not to want things. One wants many things for no better reason than that advertisers train us to want them.

- John Calder being sane and heartening, from Textualities.

DIANE SAWYER ASKS "WHO KILLED LAURA PALMER?"

ABC passive-aggressively ambush their own show, in no way confirming those persistent rumours that network pressures forced David Lynch and Mark Frost to prematurely spoil Twin Peaks. Viewers just couldn't bear the seven episodes' (seven episodes!) worth of delayed gratification, apparently. Hardly Who Shot J.R.?, was it?

P.S. Actually, I'm not one to talk. I'm binge-watching Cracker (like Twin Peaks, one of those series that aired just on the frontier of before my time) at the moment and it feels a little retrograde to artifically recreate the traditional one-weeks' repose between episodes.

INSIDE THE LEMON

Notes for landscape tones... Long sequences of tempera. Light filtered through the essence of lemons. An air full of brick dust - sweet-smelling brick-dust and the odour of hot pavements slaked with water. Light damp clouds, earth-bound yet seldom bring rain. Upon this squirt dust-red, dust-green, chalk-mauve and watered crimson-lake.

- Justine, Lawrence Durrell


Yeah, it's Alexandria, not Budapest, but Durrell's palette seems to apply to these close, sweaty days. I rather like it. During Budapest's long work day, the quiet streets are suspended in treacle, one-foot-in-front of the other slowed by some immense drag, the heat waves rising off the concrete emit a faint hum. Every evening, a truck comes road to water the roads (against cracked tarmac?) and and by dusk the brick dust from the VIIth's ever-present roadworks hangs pink and low.