Monthly Archives: May 2006

Purtroppo sono brutto

May 11th, 2006

My face
Is all over the place
Angles galore
Nose to the floor
One eye’s in heaven
The other’s next door.
Singular eyebrow
The crooked half-grin
Just asking for someone
To smash it in…

GayLord’s

May 11th, 2006

Maybe one of the reasons why sporting success has been so hard to come by in this country is that the sportsmen and women kind of suspected that all the efforts involved would be worth nothing more than a quick buck to the powers that be at all levels: sporting bodies, governments and big business. On the back of our Ashes success last Summer, this has been proven. The sport itself was never allowed to celebrate its transformation from one with less support than a Primark girdle to one that people (briefly) cared more than fuckwit-ball about, rather the celebration was done on its behalf by the ECB and the MCC who respectively sold a sport at its national viewing peak to Sky for several hundred million (unthinkable in the days of Atherton when it could have been swapped for a toffee apple or a blow job off of Geoffrey Boycott), and raised the ticket prices at Lord’s several times above inflation. As a result of their fiendish avarice I now have to sit in my garden in the sunshine today instead of sitting indoors watching the Lord’s sunshine, and tomorrow I have to pay through the nose to go and sit in the Lord’s sunshine when I could be sitting in my garden.

Homework

May 9th, 2006

Sitting alone at my desk in my parents house looking out at the garden and thinking about a cup of tea. Marketing letters strewn scribbled upon around the room and a headache from the night before. Makes me think that I hate working from home, but actually, it’s ok, just a bit quiet and hard to concentrate. Maybe I will have that cup of tea…..

Three-bed-semi apocalypse

May 8th, 2006

Had the pleasure this weekend of watching a film made by, starring and certainly heavily funded by estate agents. When I say a film, I really mean a film in that it was shot properly, clearly had a script of some form, was properly edited and most importantly was full of explosions, automatic gun fire and protracted fight scenes. It was based on apocalypse now and it’s central message seemed to be to say “we are cold-killing salesmen types, that dominate the battlefield in the same way that we dominate the local housing market”. Normally this kind of corporate offering appalls me, but I have to admit that in this case, the film was so well executed and the actors so into it (including shouts of ‘lets kill some gooks’ and ‘I really love the smell of napalm in the morning, me’) that the whole thing pulled off rather well. So good work Gibbs Gillespie, I will never mess with you over rent payments again and apologise for the incident a few years ago when I failed to convince one of my inebriated pals not to urinate on the luxury cars in your car park. Please don’t kill me.

Inside my soul is a beautiful place

May 5th, 2006

Inside my soul is a beautiful place
Where great symphonies get written
Where Booker prize winning novels get laid down
In neatly lettered prose
On a daily basis.
My heart is full of great paintings
Great pamphlets to be written
And films
Films of epic light and colour
Stories that make you think
Walking out from the cinema hand in hand
And tear stains down your face.

The Countryside

May 4th, 2006

The countryside is best taken at high speed, through a train window in my opinion. From that vantage point, on a warm day like today, the green fields, small hamlets and woodland copses take on an idyllic blur, that makes semi-urbanites like myself feel like we might be wasting our time, tap tap tapping keyboards all day in cubicle land. We should be out there sitting on a tree stump smoking a pipe with the land rover sitting in the background and the dogs running free in the yard.

Well, yes, all that may well be true, but equally I should probably be ruling over a hareem of fine women somewhere in the south american jungle or playing pro Baseball for the Harlem JobDodgers. These are the kind of thoughts that run through my mind when I’m sitting on a train. I like the sensation of the land speeding away and that’s why I sit facing backwards. I don’t care about the land rushing up in front of me, but I’m pleased to see it moving out behind. I like the looks of sheep and factories and I like the fact they go past and I don’t have to see them again.

Am not going to try and over-analyse that, just chucking it in for context really. Just wanted to make the observation that if we did slow down (tilt train stops tilting, drop the contents of the lavatories and the smokers step off for a cigarette). If I was to take the opportunity to get off at one of these impromptu stops I probably wouldn’t wander into what had appeared to be a rural replication of the garden of Eden. Most likely close up I’d find it was a hot-bed of racial violence against immigration, headed up by some BNP style Mosely lookalike with those moustaches that you apply wax to. The village shop would have last week’s papers in it and last year’s magazines, the locals in the pub would stare at you and if you stayed long enough might treat you to a kicking or spot of buggery in the car park. Country villages are hot-beds of hatred, intolerance and bigotry and even the fields, which look so healthy green from so far away are riddled with chemicals, illegal landfills and seven-foot inbred farmers when you get up close.

Best to stay on your train, carry on thinking, carry on drinking (in my case) and look forward to getting back to a city whose all prevalent dirt doesn’t attempt to hide the degeneracy of the humans that live there unlike these dishonest disney town pestilent villagers who make their houses out of thatch and try and claim a lottery grant when they get burnt down.

The wild barking of my inner dog

May 2nd, 2006

Spent a portion of my weekend wondering how to convey to my upstairs neighbour that he and his mates were really taking the p1ss noise wise. Not just the music, guffawing and juvenile antics, but also the TALKING IN THE FUCKING CORRIDOR. By the time I was bothered enough to go and say anything, i knew that they would be totally hammered and I was afraid that the long-matured rage might burst through the surface, egged on by my complete inability to speak French when I’m angry. “Excusez, errr, huffffff, sbbbbbbbeeeer, huffffffff’. They might have snickered at this, once their initial reaction of “Oh, it’s alright, it’s us, we’re making the noise and you can see from our heightened state of ego and pleasure that it’s very much worth it” had been conveyed. Then, just possibly, I might have stopped my linguistic back-firing and done something physical to express my dismay. Like grabbing one of their heads and licking it, then barking like a vicious dog. Comedy value that image I know, but think about it – your neighbour is willing to traverse physical and animal boundaries if you wind him up too much. Do you start remembering your manners ? I think I’d make the effort. Especially if I thought that my neighbour’s next move might be curling one out under my doormat, then marking his territory with a ring of p1ss and perhaps a speckling of j1zz……..
As a footnote, you may have noticed that French people don’t generally drink to get drunk, in the sense that we and other nationalities do. There is a very good reason for this – the arrogance grows to a RIDICULOUS degree. Well, in the fair town of Bordeaux anyway.

Photoshoot malurking

May 2nd, 2006

Bopped over to Thames Valley Uni on Saturday to take some photos of tshirts, hoodies, hats and the people within them for the new frankiewedge website (this is the old one). It was an amusing business. As amusing as when you get a room full of caned and hungover people, hand them a load of expensive photographic equipment, lighting, reflecters and white screen type things and then attempt to get them to stand still long enough to take photos of their jaded, ageing faces.

Fortunately, we were aided in our plight by a couple of photography students who a) knew what they were doing with the kit, b) had done this before and c) were not afraid to bollock and push a load of strange and aggressive strangers about to get the shots they were looking for. As a result, we are now sitting on a set of the most crispy, high definition and downright well-shot images ever seen this side of a clothing website. Big thanks to Jess and Alex for that. Hope we can work together on some other stuff soon.

Looking forward hugely to getting the new website finished now (it’s just a bit too sick), and it was a wicked day that led to some other very good and perhaps not so good ideas (see photos included).

Rewind to count your blessings

May 1st, 2006

Did this post a few days ago and then stuffed it in my pocket to get dug up when I could be bothered to go through my clothing:

So I’m back and my brain is full of fog. Literally. I can’t think, I can’t walk properly and I end up sitting on the bench in the park for 15 minutes thinking about my destiny. From optimism of the days before, suddenly feel like it’s all impossible. Success is for other people. Confident people who blag and smarm their way through life. Self pity reigns supreme so I turn my tune up to max and stomp through town thinking yeah I’m an angsty fukker and don’t none of you rood boys get in my way cos I’m one day back from holiday and I’m looking for a reason to stomp your head.

Work inevitably hits like a bag of chips. A ton of work piled up on my desk and no time to read email or walk around chatting to people. Make a few phone calls trying to bumble through a few consultancy words, conveying the required polite, keen tone and steering clear of swear words or screaming down the line. They don’t like that. Then hustle round super quick because I’m on the road most of this week. Surely revenge from work for going part time. “send him to the North East. That’ll learn him.”

But now I’m on the way back from the cold lands and actually feeling a bit better. Another sleepy morning slogging it across the East Coast, another presentation (usual mixture of cold sweats, overheated armpits) and the same stilted blend of small talk with cabbies and workshop attendees alike. Through that and I’m feeling good that I’m a few days off part-time valhalla, I’ve got a bit of high-grade sitting at home, a weekend fashion shoot to plan for and a long suffering girlfriend that loves me (mostly). It’s easy to get caught up being morose and fashionable, harder to count the blessings. Probably worth it though and as I write that, the sun is coming up over the hills and the businessmen are looking up blinking from their laptops. Surely it’s a sign, or orbits or weather or something? Praise be for cups of tea, ruddy faced old people and colourful trainers. I love them.