PERSONAL RECORD
PERSONAL: ˈpəːs(ə)n(ə)l (adjective) 1. belonging to or affecting a particular person rather than anyone else.
2. of or concerning one’s private life, relationships, and emotions rather than one’s career or public life.
(noun) NORTH AMERICAN 1. an advertisement or message in the personal column of a newspaper.
“I am the autumn in the scarlet, I am the make-up on your eyes.”
From the top of Wimble.
West to East and Back Again, or How to Draw from the Window of a Train.
A week or so ago I travelled across England to pick up a car. So the away journey was by train and the return by car.
There’s a lot of enforced down time during a trip like that so I took a few photos made a few drawings, read a bit of Vonnegut, thought about stuff. Very enriching in all.
I liked the idea I could sample the sea on opposite coasts in one day. This was not possible on the way there as I was effectively on food and couldn’t get to Clevedon.
So my morning photo of the West that day was this one:
Caught the 11:05 to Paddington, with the express idea of drawing, a possibly trying to catch up on the 365 drawing thing I’ve been going. Not sure if you have tried drawing on a train, most people are too close for you to study without causing a uncomfortable situation and generally stuff is going passed so quickly outside you need a super fast photographic memory to get it in your brain before you can decide how to represent it on the page.
So I decided to go for the horizon, because that goes pass slower and if you miss a bit it doesn’t look too weird if you just join on to the contiuation.
I added the times and locations at points, also a few announcements from the guard to add some
ambience
.
I got as far as Didcot Parkway on that then got the I’ll-miss-my-stop-fear, even theough the train was terminating. The connections were really tight as I got a super cheap ticket I had to make everyone.
Managed to take a picture of Yea Olde Saint Pancras as I got to Kings Cross.
Then there I was in the East. It’s quite flat there. We picked up the car somewhere in the middle of the Fens, this is what it is like there.
Mostly sky.
I stayed over night at my folks place. There’s a lot of amazing old photos there. They should write a book.
Here is a picture of my Grandad at a Grasstrack meeting at Bourne in June 1949, less that 4 years after the end of the Second World War. Two Soldiers looking on. (Grandad’s on the left):
So the next day I set off as early as I could (which wasn’t that early), this time because I had wheels I could take a picture of the sea, here known as the Wash. It’s quite shallow there so the sea is often very flat compared to the ocean that crashes in on the West coast.
Wanted to draw on the way back too. But you can’t draw when driving. That is bad. So I took breaks (7 hour drive altogether), and when I took a break I drew the backend of whatever I could see.
I got caught in a nasty jam on the M62 so didn’t get back home until late. But just in time to catch the end of the light in this picture of the opposite Sea.
“*blank*blank*blank*, what's all this then?"
There’s nothing like the arrival of a new interesting social media thing to get people talking about talking.
Ello kind of blew open this last week, taking the creators by surprise slightly. I got myself and invite from a dear internet friend, and there’s only one way to find out if you look like something. It could be better than bad.
Turns out I do quite like it.
There’s a lot of speculation and discussion as to whether its the Facebook Killer prophecy speaks off, or just another Diaspora. Google+ was a Facebook Killer for about 2 days and that had Google behind it.
You can’t buy cool though.
Ello’s first inhabitants were the creatives, artists, writers and weirdos (and I mean that in the nicest possible way) we all love and adore, there weeks before anyone else. Then, because of it’s most righteous indie web aspirations it also has provided a landing pad for those fleeing Facebook as a result of its banning accounts without users genuine names (immediately alienating large areas of the LGBT community for one).
And they say they won’t advertise at you or sell your data, which is nice, but has many wondering how it will pay for itself, suggesting the big sell out is inevitable, or has already happened.
I’m hopeful it won’t. But it does have me wondering why we all just don’t post to our own sites all the time anyways, instead of socially mediating and handing all our content to someone elses website.
Makes me think I should be using this more.
Maybe I will.
Or maybe I’ll see you on Ello.
(Something that does work nicely on Ello is gifs, the one above is over 2mb and it went up and played no problem).
Condensing
The building work began this week and the many weeks of hard work clearing the garage and the existing extension ready for demolition payed off as we put the last box of random items that didn’t fit anywhere else into the car minutes before the demolition of part of the house began.
I’m not sure what our ratio for reduction was, we had some storage space, we sold a lot, assimilated various bits into the rest of the house and into the shed, but there was a lot that we had to lose.
It was very much a loaded process for us as each item seemed to hold another branching tree of memories. One example being a cardboard box which we had been keeping some paper work in, once cleared I picked it up ready to dismatle it for recycling, only to read the label and find it was the box that delivered the toys for my eldest’s first birthday, many years ago.
Notes from lost loved ones, postcards from the other sides, keep sakes from when we had time to keep stuff.
Some of the most difficult things to go through were artwork of various kinds. Especially the children’s, we have three so there were large quantities which we had to reduce or else we would not have had any room to live.
Then there was our own artwork, a constant stream of surprises, as we discovered forgotten box after forgotten portfolio. We tried a loss rate of 2:1 (thus keeping about a third of what we had).
So I was quite pleased with myself when I managed to reduce a very large plastic container of art, comics, notebooks, animation drawings into this suitcase.
It’s nice to lose some of the lazy stuff I could see in there, you could easily tell if a hand was drawn from looking properly or just drawing an approximation of a hand preprogrammed in.
I’m reasonably pleased with what is left.
I suppose I ought to digitize some of this stuff and put it on the site here. If it stands up.
Speaking of standing up, the garage this picture was takenin just a few days ago isn’t anymore.
Exciting times.
…and so it begins.
mornin’
On the River Mekong, Nong Khai, Thailand (1991)
Clearing out the garage and the study ready for them to be demolished is proving a slow and emotional process. You find the strangest artifacts. This is me doing a “selfie ” in the nineties. Alone on a boat in the River Mekong (long story). The idea of travelling solo for months at a time is very far away from where I am now. That is not a bad thing.
Look, I’m doing my best Hunter S Thompson like an actual ****. Unfortunately one can’t really pull it off when one has the face of a baby.
Paul Greer 