Alas, I can’t take all the credit for all of it. Huge props must go to Manish Gori at Themezen, for supplying me with this template, and putting up with my constant requests for suport via e-mail. He got me there in the end. Also, the wonderful Joel Baker designed some icons for me. You should check out his webspace.

All photographs are mine of course, as is the writing. The re-design puts the focus on the images of my work, whilst allowing me to work on other projects and display them here. On the home page, I can feature up to five of my strongest works with a little bit of writing about each of them. It also keeps my Tumblr, Blog and Shop centre-stage, whilst having some space for other dedicated areas for the side-projects I’m engaged in.

I hope you like the newness, and I shall endeavour to be more regular in my updates.

It’s always a difficult one re-designing a website. You know that when you push the button marked “change how everything looks”, it creates a whole lot of work for yourself that you don’t need. However, this needed doing. My previous blog template was an adapted template from the web, and although I’d put a lot of work into it, and was pleased with the results, I knew that it wasn’t right about a month after I’d done it. It just looked too amatuerish somehow. The new template, I’m sure you’ll agree, looks much better, allows a lot more scope for future updates, while also being something I’ll hopefully be able to live with for a lot longer.

Thanks for stopping by.

Michael.

So I’ve basically got myself a new phone. After years of being a dyed-in-the-wool Nokia supporter, I have changed to HTC.

I don’t consider myself to be a social media maven/guru/etc., but I do use social media, I base a lot of my work on that kind of thing, I do a lot of it with my phone, and I do feel that I have something to say about my choice. And I would be interested to see if people disagree with my reasons.

Like most people I know, when the Nokia N95 came out, I goggled, marvelled, and was envious. I’ve been using a Nokia N86 8MP for the past two years (the one in the photo at the top of this post), and when it came out it was the dog’s nuts. It came with Nokia’s Symbian operating system, and one of the features was that you could download any updates to the system direct to the phone via SIM card or Wifi – you didn’t need to log in to OVI, or any of that malarkey.

Well, reader in two years of owning that there phone, I got one upgrade and then they stopped making the phone. I felt that the build quality was appalling. It crashed repeatedly and moved at a snails pace. It shipped with a dodgy battery. I spent 2 years wistfully gazing out the window and typing #*0000* in the hope that more upgrades would come. In the 4 years since the N95, and especially since the advent of the iPhone, Nokia’s Symbian looks and feels clunky and clumsy. It’s a complete ball-ache to use, and I can not find any easy way to make this system to interact with my MacbookPro.

You see, I’m a simple user. I have shit to do. I do not have time to partition my Hard Drive in order to get my phone to do all the things it can do, when most other phones will just plug in and get on with it. It is shockingly criminal that Nokia have never worked smoothly with OSX.

And now I hear that the Android Operating System offered to work with Nokia, and they turned it down. Not only that, they’ve decided to jump ship and make Windows Phone 7 their new operating system. You. Have. Got. To. Be. Kidding. Me.

If I were to go and get a Nokia N8, I would be going with Nokia’s Symbian, which they are abandoning. Based on my experience of updates and fixes with the N86, do you think they’re going to bother making sure my N8 works tickety boo? No, me neither.

It’s a shame. I’ve wildly supported Nokia over the years. And yep, that N8 has lots of good features. The aforementioned camera, an FM transmitter, DAB radio to name but three. But for the reasons I’ve outlined, as they say on Dragon’s Den: “I’m out.”

So why not the iPhone? Why not the iPhone? Get an iPhone. Ah, but you haven’t got an iPhone. The iPhone‘s better.

Or so several very annoying people say.

I am a complete Apple fanatic, and they do make exceedingly good laptops. But sorry. That camera? Still not great, despite what they’ve brought to it recently. And really there’s nothing on that phone that you would need and can’t get on any other phone just as smoothly.

And then there’s what a friend of mine refers to as the Jobs-ian Fist. If you want to listen to an MP3 YOU BOUGHT in iTunes on any other non-Apple device, you can’t. At least not without a lot of faffing around which is totally unnecessary. Back to the “life’s too short” issue you’ve got with things like partitioning hard drives for a Nokia.

Seriously guys, it’s like phones are stuck in the late 80s. We went through all this “getting one piece of equipment to talk to another” malarkey before with PCs and we dealt with it. Now can the rest of you catch up again please?

So I bought the HTC Incredible S. It’s got an 8 megapixel camera. Not 12, but still a good enough compromise.

And the operating system is Android. God, I can’t tell you what a relief that is.

All the Apps I need to do my Social Media shit.

It does have it’s disadvantages for sure. (What? It still all runs in the background? It kills your battery life and murders your family while you’re asleep? No, I made that last bit up. You can’t tell, can you.)

But really, it just. Does. What. I. Want. It. To. Do.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a life to return to.

Listen to this – I’m somewhere that I shouldn’t be….

Daniel Defoe, author of “Robinson Crusoe” also wrote a book called “Journal of the Plague Year” It’s a book about the experience of navigating your way through London at the time of plague.

In principle this sounds a very simple task, but in the days before the A-Z, and before streets had names, one would navigate one’s way via the known sights and landmarks of the area. When the plague struck, however, various streets and buildings would be quarantined and closed, making the usual paths un-navigable, and forcing oneself into unknown territories, rendering the capital city un-recognisable. And of course, just as quickly as new routes sprang up, they would be quarantined again, forcing yet more new passageways to open up.

The book documents these journeys, as well as the experiences and impact on the person as the city develops. Along with William Blake, these two seminal authors are now thought to be the earliest forms of what has now come to be known as psychogeography, a term coined and and formalised by Guy Debord and the Situationist movement.

I think it’s important both as a spiritual and emotional experience and a politically transgressive tool, as a means of resistance and re-gaining control of one’s environment, and becomes more vital as space is increasingly privatised and gentrified in contemporary society.

For years, psychogeography languished in obscurity, but more recently it has been revived as by many psychogeographical societies (google them, and you’ll find a whole host of organisations) and the authors Will Self, and Iain Sinclair, who is speaking at Greenbelt this year.

I was very pleased to find that Iain Sinclair is at Greenbelt this year, and hope to catch his talk.

If you miss it, you should be able to get the talk from the Greenbelt shop. Should be a good ‘un.

I managed to stream some of it, but you should be able to buy his talk as a download from the Greenbelt website soon. Awesome stuff, embedded below. Sorry that the image goes a bit foggy after a while, but cameraphone goes a bit doolally on a low battery.

Enjoy:

Every year, about this time, I go to a festival called Greenbelt. Tomorrow I shall be doing so once again. I’m nearly packed. Nearly.

For those of you who know little about it, it’s a music and arts festival that happens at the Cheltenham Racecourse. It is a Christian festival, which inevitably puts some people off, but don’t let that deter you. It’s very welcoming and accepting, and there’s something for everyone here.

Every year I go, I never know what to expect. It’s different every time. It’s inspiring, exciting, thought provoking, maddening, relaxing, stressful and exhilarating all at once. I’m kind of wishing I’d gone down there early today like a few others, but life stuff prevents.

From an artists point of view, there’s plenty to look at, and plenty of thought provoking material. I’m quite looking forward to see Billy Childish this year. Plus I get to see some wonderful people that I see sometimes just once every year.

I shall be going in my capacity as a social media person. You’ll be able to follow me on Qik, Twitter, Audioboo, possibly some youTube and Vimeo as well.

Last year I did a few videos, with the running theme of “Is it possible to do Greenbelt with a 3 year old and a 3 MONTH old?” Which you can see here here here here here..

This year I’ll be working more with the others as a cohesive team, so I’m not sure what my role is yet. I may do interviews with other artists, and walk around some works talking about them like a sort of tour guide, or something like that. It might also be an excuse to indulge my new found love of psychogeography.

We’ll see. Hopefully I’ll be able to post some of it here.

I finished another work in the series of paintings I’ve been doing with Japanese endpapers today. Very pleased with it too.

The work is called “Via Dolorosa”, it’s acrylic paint and spray paint on board, and it’s 26cms x 34 cms x 5cms.

The figure is from a photo I took of one of the kids who play outside my window on the South London estate where I live. One day, one of their games took a particularly violent turn (more so than usual), and the lad in the photo fell badly on his wrist. I couldn’t tell if it was genuinely serious, or if he was playing it up to gain sympathy. Either way, he seemed to be ok after a while.

As an image though, I thought it was quite poignant, in that it could be about vulnerability, brutality, school memories, survival, and so on.
The image also works really well as a contrast with the leafy pattern, the soft focus – I don’t have much time for romanticised notions of either childhood or socio-economic dis-advantage, and art has a way of backing you into a corner and forcing you to think about such things. Especially when you’re making it yourself.

The flash from the camera has washed out some of the colour in the picture, so some of the detail is lost. If you come along to the show I’m exhibiting in next month, you’ll be able to see it a bit better in the flesh.

Church organ-like, and very tall,
with keys and stops and throttles,
it made a sound by blowing air
through different turps-filled bottles.

It made a lovely warbling sound
that drew the sharpest breath
rendered all more poignant by
the player’s possible death.

I gathered friends to hear me play.
They coughed and choked and gagged.
I castigated one of them
who nearly lit a fag.*

And soon recitals were performed
to many gathered throngs
to hear selected medleys of
White Spiritual songs.

Performing indoor concert halls
became a thrill again
until The Turpsichord was banned
by Health & Safety men.

I suffered much for all this art.
I played when I was bladdered.
The drinking took my mind off it
this massive fire hazard.

I planned a last performance then,
a swan-song, if you will.
The weight of suffering for my art
had made me very ill.

It had to be an outdoor gig
with careful preparation
to find a way to get around
the government legislation.

And so I played it one last time
the people came from far.
I poured my soul into the songs
then lit a big cigar.

That’s how you end an arty life -
you go out with a bang.
I left the earth for worms to eat
but with a turps-ish tang.

*For the benefit of our American cousins – “fag” is English slang for cigarette. I do NOT set fire to homosexuals.

I went to see the new “Altermodern” show today on it’s first day of opening at TATE Britain in London, UK.

I went with some trepidation. I’d read a pre-amble in the TATE magazine, and I have to say that I find the movement back to modernism is one that I find alarming to say the least. However, there’s a big difference between an idea and a show, which in this case turned out to be just as well.

I went into the main hall at TATE Britain and was distinctly disappointed by what I saw. The work was OK, but not great. Subodh Gupta’s saucepan tower in the shape of a mushroom cloud was quite spectacular, and I always have a soft spot for Mike Nelson, but the rest of it left me pretty cold.

However, I’d missed that there was another, main part to it that you have to pay to get into. It’s not very well signposted, and there’s no little hand-held leaflet guide to tell you where you are, but with a wave of my TATE members card, I swished in for free.

I was straight away confronted by Franz Ackerman’s profusion of colour that was strangely calming despite it’s luridity. Piles of disused flags and an empty cage signaling the escape from shackles of nationhood into a bright new global modernism. Yes, I get it.

However, before long I came to see the idea of Altermodernism as a conceit of the curator – an idea to hang a show on. He’s coined a term, but will it catch on? I hope not, but in any case I found that once I’d manage to detach and forget about the idea of altermodernity from the actual works I was looking, at the show became much more enjoyable.

The first few works perversely helped me do this. Olivia Plender & Joachim Koester’s works felt more like plundering the past than a trajectory for the future. Firstly in “The Hashish Club” the hemp-heads unite to remember halcyon opium-filled days, and then the work on the Kibbo Kift Kindred completes the appropriations.

Thank goodness for some humour in the form of Charles Avery’s work (especially “Untitled (Head of an Aleph)” ” I really enjoyed his new world, almost inventing a past and describing a present that never actually happened but should have. I thought the drawings were perfectly executed, and the stellar maps drew me in too.

For the chillout enthusiasts, my old mucker Darren Almond exhibited his moonscapes, and I was quite happy to collapse on the scatter cushions in Gustav Metzger’s LCD projections – Liquid Crystals projected and altered by the heat, a bit like lava lamps. More than a nod and a wink to the abstract expressionists who, of course, we tend to associate with modernism. Very good works all.

Walead Beshty Fed-Exed a load of glass boxes around the world packed with little protection. The resulting damaged cubes are shown. Raised a smile and some thoughts about travel and handling. Very engaging – like little people with their own story to tell.

Shortly thereafter, I found myself standing in what only can be described as a room full of vibrators. Shaking the floor and humming inside my head. The possibilities for innuendo are endless, but you will not think about that at all when you stand in that room. Spine tingling – literally.

Those are the works that stood out with some brilliance for me. Like all good shows (and it IS a good show) its one that I will need to return to many times, and I may like completely different works for completely different reasons.

But I guess the biggest obstacle of the altermodern idea for me is that if you’re saying that you’ve learned from the postmodernist critique, then why would you exhibit the majority of artists from OECD countries? It’s not exactly a record of the marginalised and at worst smacks of imperialism.  And I suspect the “creolisation” that Bourriaud talks of as a part of altermodernism leaves no room for the poor or marginalised.

But then, I never like feeling that I’ve been “steamrolled”.

This is a good way of transferring a photographic image onto canvas. It gives the image a strange quality as you’ll see..