Follow through

2013 has drawn to a close and 2014 has commenced. I spent 10 days in Stockholm where it wasn't snowing and not that cold. This was the warmest December in 50 years, I was told.
I walked around, visited the monument of the Andrée Expedition, the graves of the three Swedes who attempted to reach the North Pole by balloon in 1897.
The monument is a tall concrete sail, depicting the efforts of the party and charting the haphazard journey of the balloon, the three graves facing outwards from this point. It is on a small hill, surrounded by trees on three sides, and I felt a stillness there that I still think about.

Like balloons being controlled by the wind, most things rarely go in straight lines. I think Agent Cooper mentioned that in an episode of Twin Peaks (I added the balloon bit to reiterate the pertinence of this phrase). Though everyone has pretty much uttered that sentence in one form or another at one or more points in their lives. Sayings like that make sense because they are true. An occasional reminder however, never goes amiss.

I have been thinking about following through. Usually when I think about following through, I am thinking about cricket, as that is what bowlers do once the ball has left their hand. As I have now retired from my cricketing career (as of 10 years ago - I decided to quit while I was ahead, I had peaked by 16 I believe) I apply this thought to myself in terms of ideas. I have ideas all the time, sometimes words, sometimes images, written on post-it notes at the library, sketches masking taped to the wall at home by my desks, laboriously scrawled in my journal, mentioned in passing to a friend.

And then nothing really happens.

An idea doesn't get any better the longer you ruminate over it. It isn't a cheese, or whiskey, or wine, or anything else that matures. It doesn't rot, like fruit or eggs. It is more like a loaf bread that gets left out - it just goes stale.

I have been working on a sculpture for over a year now. Knitting fishing line. How I envisage it now is nothing like what I first considered doing with it. The more I work at it, the further the ideas evolve. Today Kjell asked me if it would ever be finished. I said I didn't know. The process knitting the straight line into interconnected loops functions as much as a way for ordering my thoughts as jotting them down or uttering them aloud.

If there is one thing I have learnt through spending over twelve months knitting fishing line in my spare time, it is that I personally do not make much progress in my thought process if I am not working on something. Need to keep the hands busy so the brain ticks over. I have spent 2013 attempting (somewhat in vain) to figure out 'what it is I want to do'. I have not made any great strides forward in that rather vague endeavour. But I believe, as with the knitted fishing line, that if I follow through on ideas which have occurred to me throughout the past year or so, act upon them, then perhaps I will be closer to realising this. 

2014 is the year of the follow through. I'm calling it now.

Merlin & Voodoo

Lägenheten hade en balkong och vi gillade att sitta där och dricka öl på kvällen medan vi lyssnade på skivor och pratade med varandra. Ibland, brukade våra grannars katter besöka oss på balkongen. De hette Merlin och Voodoo. Typiska namn för hippies katter, tyckte jag.
Alex och jag brukade ofta handla möbler till vår lägenhet från second-hand butiker. Jag kommer ihåg när Alex köpte en soffa med klädsel som var täckt med ett kattmönster. Jag tror att den fortfarande är i vardagsrummet.

The apartment had a balcony and we liked to sit there and drink beer in the evening while we listened to records and talked with each other. Sometimes the neighbour's cats used to visit us on the balcony. Their names were Merlin and Voodoo. Typical names for hippie cats, I thought.
Alex and I used to often buy furniture for our apartment from second hand shops. I remember when Alex bought a couch with upholstery that was covered in a cat pattern. I believe it is still in the living room.

(A brief excerpt from a short piece of writing for my Swedish class, about my old apartment in Auckland. It is extremely satisfying knowing that I can describe furniture with cats on it, and offer my opinion on interesting choices in feline names. I feel like I should be compiling a volume of these texts as 'A Brief History of Florence and her family, a collection of thoughts in Swedish. Or something to a similar effect.)

Sushine state of mind

via, via

Fendi Spring 2011

Words of advice/not so subliminal messages backstage at Michael Kors, which remind me a lot of Dr. Lawrence Jacoby's personal hypnosis cues, and those bizarre pictures dentists' always seem to have pinned to the ceiling above the chair.

Times, they are a-changin'

The seasons change, and autumnal winds slow my cycling and whip my hair into tumbleweed, and it starts to darken at 8 o'clock instead of 11. I remind myself soon I will have to check when daylight saving is due to end. Before I was always confused as to what I was meant to do at the change over - in what direction was I meant to wind my clocks, and no one I asked every seemed completely certain of their answer.
Now I have a clever little saying in order to instantly recall this vital piece of information, and will be admired everywhere for being able to pass on this knowledge.

SPRING FORWARD / FALL BACK

(admittedly I never call Autumn "Fall", but 'Autumn back' doesn't have quite the same ring to it.)

As found in 'Kissing the Gunner's Daughter', an Inspector Wexford mystery, by Ruth Rendall.

CLUES

"ALL SOLUTIONS AND NO CLUES, THAT'S WHAT THE DUMBHEADS WANT. THAT'S WHAT THE BLOODY NOVEL IS: ALL 'HE SAID, SHE SAID', DESCRIPTIONS OF THE SKY...I'D RATHER IT WAS THE OTHER WAY ROUND, ALL CLUES, NO SOLUTIONS, THAT'S THE WAY THINGS REALLY ARE. PLENTY OF CLUES, NO SOLUTIONS."


Philip E. Marlow, writer of detective stories

The Singing Detective (1986)
Episode 4: 'Clues'

Love Letters

Complete set of lead type at Ri Xing Typography, one of the last factories in Taiwan to produce traditional Chinese type.

But in practice, it was not suitable for Chinese—a language with over 45,000 unique characters. Typesetting in Chinese took “minding p’s and q’s” to a whole new level, and accuracy was challenging when characters were essentially compounds of many radicals and ideograms. Running a Chinese letterpress shop required an enormous storage space and basic literacy of at least 4,000 commonly used characters.

read more about the demise of movable type in China

DEIRDRE

misspelt single title.



could possibly be part of collections named "Songs featuring my parents' name's", or "Beach Boys songs featuring a girls name in the title".

"Long Promised Road"/"Deirdre" (1971)
The Beach Boys

RHUBARB

from 'Rhubarb' (1969)

The word 'Rhubarb' is used by actors and extras to simulate a low key conversation, mumbling and general hubbub, particularly in crowd scenes. The word was used due to its lack of harsh sounding consonants, and spoken by a large group of people, unsynchronized, effectively created a continuous murmur.
When a few actors gathered backstage and represented ‘noise without’ made by a mob, they intoned the sonorous word ‘rhubarb’. The action was called ‘rhubarbing’, the actors ‘rhubarbers’.

The Eric Sykes' 1969 short film 'Rhubarb' plays on this insensible babble, with the script consisting entirely of the repeated word 'Rhubarb'. This was later remade by Sykes in 1980 under the title 'Rhubarb Rhubarb'.

FROWST

"I hung up, went through the gate, down the ramp, walked about from here to Ventura to get to Trace Eleven and climbed aboard a coach that was already full of the drifting cigarette smoke that is so kind to your throat and nearly always leaves you with one good lung. I filled and lit a pipe and added to the general frowst."

Playback, Raymond Chandler.

Frowst (noun) British Informal.
a hot and stale atmosphere; stuffiness; stifling warmth in a room.

Now to incorporate frowst into everyday conversation.

Charmingly barmy

Today at Rocky's the shower exploded, and an emergency plumber arrived to save the day. He described the plumbing and water works as "She's all a bit Heath Robinson", a phrase I now believe will become part of my everday jargon.

W. Heath Robinson was a cartoonist known for drawings of 'eccentric machines' and his name has since entered British language as a description of any unnecessarily complex and implausible contraption that achieved absurdly simple results.

Used in scenarios such as the BBC's Planet Earth documentary series, in which devices used to create smooth camera movements, such as the effective steadicam made out of bicycle wheels and rope used to sail up a 100 metre high mound of bat droppings, were said by David Attenborough to be "Heath Robinson affairs".

In Pink Floyd's 1971 concert film Live at Pompeii, Nick Mason described the band's early on-stage musical experiments as "Heath Robinson".

Also. W. Heath Robinson was the man behind "The multimovement tabby silencer", which automatically threw water at serenading cats.



See also - Heath Robinson (codebreaking machine).

A coffee with two sugars

While at the opening of the exhibition To Have and To Hold: Making Collections at Objectspace, my cousins and I began to amass a collection of words which we were forever finding spelt incorrectly. One cousin provided the greatest rule for remembering the spelling of 'necessary'.

"One Coffee, Two Sugars, please."

Installation shot of To Have and To Hold: Making Collections, 2009

image from Objectspace.