The Fragile Ego knows No Bounds

I bit the Christmas bullet last night and braved the shops. Well, Dundrum shopping centre; it was raining...

Gone are the days when shopping at exmass time involved a 40 minute car journey in a Toyota Starlet to Nutgrove or Stillorgan. Oh Stillorgan shopping centre!- they had EVERYTHING. The very tip of the finger on the pulse. Dunnes, Golden Discs, the Toyshop that isn't Smiths, A-Wear, featuring very trendy John Rocha mustard culottes.

Dundrum was packed. Since I'm going to a wedding today I, to be true to my lastminute.com status, left it till last night to find something to wear. Wavering between my two usual styles of Waynetta Slob (I Love Trackies and Chip Stains) or Liz from Corrie ( I Love Leopardskin), I had to find something suitable for church and dressy enough for Rock the Boat later.

I cast off many shops in my lap around the centre. Obviously none my mother would venture into, like East, but I did stick my head into M&S. Places like Next put me in mind of office girls from Essex on the pull with a couple of bottles of West Coast Cooler, so no. I tried River Island but thought Junior Slut to be a little to the left of what one wears to mass.

In the end I returned to the first dress I saw in A-Wear, but three hours later, with a banging headache and a bottle of wine for later. Tis my birthday after all :)

(The fact I'm going to someone else's wedding on my birthday has not gone unnoticed by my inner child. I will, at some stage of the proceedings, be sneaking candles onto the wedding cake and demanding a song. The fragile ego knows no bounds)

Tying ot saty osber and awathc Goks fshinog=n fix an ddrink tea. ( love goki. may or myat not bedrunk.

Open Milk Tray

I'm very close to throwing my computer out the plate glass winders onto the buskers below. It's an icy December Friday night, I should be out boozing and telling people what to buy me for my birthday. Instead I'm am still jammed into a laptop, reading my last post with an embarrassed and disdainful snortle.

But lo!- tomorrow is an Open Day in the studio I rent, and I made the ridiculous promised to myself to have made an E.P. before the year's end. That is why my computer keeps crashing.

If I, or the pc, make it through the night, feel free to visit us from 12 to 5.30pm, where I'll be thrusting copies of my homemade nightmare into the hands of children.

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On an unrelated note, I must remind myself not to buy jeans with shiny studs in the arse again. They may fulfill my yen for teenage slutduggery, but they give more dimples on the ass than a Milktray, and are darn uncomfortable too.

This Is Not A Serious Post, But a Postal Series

My head has been stuck in my laptop for ages now, working, would you believe, not just googling "school boy rugby".

I'm working on a baby wee Extended Play c.d. for release on Saturday, featuring four sound drawings and songs. I'm getting so into it, they're all I can think of. I may have aural obsession and can't get that canon chorus from betwixt my ears.

That may or may not account for my lack of blog, lack of words, lack of interest in much else apart from 1 2 3 4 and skipping beats and atonal harmony.

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It will all be over by Saturday, thanks God.

Hannah Hoch

For some reason I agreed to teach a short college course on art history, which is patently ridiculous because I think I was asleep for that whole jazz during college. Time to Wiki-it up, copy and paste and Robert Delaunay's your uncle, I'm a genius.

On my internettical travels from Der Blaue Reiter to Surrealism, I rediscovered Hannah Hoch. Hoch was a member of the Berlin Dada group, a bisexual and an artist. As much as Dadaists and Surrealists ejaculated about equality and a level playing field in cultural life, of course they meant just for men. One of the members of the Cabaret Voltaire did remember Hoch, though, for the beer and sandwiches she always managed to provide despite the group having no money.

Well done Hannah. Her work rocks; por ejemplo-

Five UnEasy Pieces; Je Vous En Prie

1. The days are sliding past like fit young men playing wartime baseball; lean calves slowing their gait and hands splayed to stop at base.

2. There's a piece of tape sticking like a tongue out of one of big, draw-down windows opposite. I wonder which Mauritian guy living in that tiny bedroom uses it to open the jammed window jambs when he gets hot, if he gets hot, on nights after work in the middle of town. It visually bothers me because it ruins the up-down lines of the rest of the windows, like a rogue white tampon string wriggling it's way out of a page three pair of fancy knickers. You don't want it there; it spoils the illusion.

3. Work is hard to do today. I feel the increase of stress and the decrease of time, sprinkled with a dash of crippling self-doubt. You'd think I'd have gotten used to that by now. My starsign said that I should get going with the work and action thing, cos of Mars and Venus being in my element, doncha know. I just feel worse and wasting and choc-full of spent potential, like a tired old clown. Even though I didn't even try.

4. I cried hot tears of self-pity yesterday on the couch. The catalyst was The Lost Prince, about George V's epileptic son. The fluffer was the dog bone on the furry carpet, its creamy and glistening knobs of shiny cartilage in opposition to the remnants of stringy scarlet flesh. Sitting on the wiry chenille rug, I felt sick and thought of cows.

5. This morning I was dreaming. There was a new road from Bray to Greystones over the hill, dangerously near to the cliff, and you had to trek with a guide. The guides were Victorian and West-Brit, and wore corsets, britches and crinolenes. How did I get here, and how can I get home?

He Moves Through the Fair (Like an Ass)

Oh my Holy Jesus. This has just completed my Friday.

Love the ginge. Love It.