sketch

Although I've been keeping this blog for a couple of years now, it does have one function that hasn't really been exploited enough. There is potential for this to act as a kind of online scrapbook, compiling half-formed ideas and putting them out into the ether. Now the course is finished, and the mind can wander while I fulfill trivial obligations for the bank, I'm free to think about things and maybe even create something for the first time in ages. Could it be possible? We'll see...

A few such things: I never watch TV very much, but a couple of Channel 4 documentaries are interesting. One a crudely exploitative programme made in the 90s about celebrity stalkers, with interviewees (obviously suffering mental health problems) fixated on low-rent figures like Mike Read and Sam Fox.

Another documentary was on last year, the best thing I've seen in ages, following London 'cleaners' going about their business. Their grim specialization was in cleaning up after people who had died with no friends or family to recover the body. The corpses had often laid there rotting for weeks. The 'highlight' was the house of one young man who had spent months collecting his faeces, storing it in carefully folded scraps of newspaper piled as high as the ceiling. The smell must have been overwhelming, and even just to see it was quite intense. Like the ultimate surrealist installation.



Another appropriate reference would be the work of American outsider artist Henry Darger, though the monographs are all out of print and command high prices. There's one that can be ordered from the US costing about $100, maybe for when I've done enough overtime. There is an affordable documentary available on DVD I think.

The writing of Peter Sotos, and pornography in general. Susan Sontag's brilliant essay is there to provide intellectual justification, as if any is really needed.

Wasn't there a CD out a while back of letters that lonely perverts had written to page 3 models, explaining in lumpen prose their seedy fantasies? Narrated by actors of course, sadly.


I'd mined a similar seam in the Olympia drawings I did for the Embassy gallery a couple of years back, and also 'The Devil In Miss Broon' piece written for Yuck 'n Yum.

So there's a few things, and they do add up to something or other I'm sure.