bliss in three bottles purple

pickled beetroot with horseradish

1.4 kg beetroot
4 tbs fresh diced horseradish
1 tbs black pepper
1 tbs caraway seeds
3-6 whole cloves
1 bay leave
0.7 l white wine vinegar
125ml water
80-100g brown sugar
1 tsp salt

wash beetroot, cover in cold water and bring to boil for 25-45min, depending on size. peel and slice or dice. fill while still warm into sterilised jars (this lot made 3x 500ml jars), alongside horseradish and spices. boil vinegar, water, sugar and salt. fill jars with the liquid and seal immediately. it keeps for a minimum of six months; i had some of them for well over a year or two; great with olive oil and parmesan. the recipe asks for fresh horseradish but any strong horseradish sauce works as well (cream in sauce doesn't seem to spoil the pickle).

people do things

i am still thinking in blog, a lot of the times. so, there have been many beginnings or even full blog posts for the past couple of months. yet: many of them didn't appear here. i kind of used them as thinking tools for myself or discussed them in person with others offline.

so, it's been rather quiet. let me see, if that can change again.

one of the more persistent thoughts over the last week or so is one of amazement and surprise. it's a little game i've been playing with myself and which now is fairly explicit: what are the things that i do not need?

i don't like the virtue of frugality that this seemingly establishes. and i don't think that's what it's about. instead, i like it to be about the boundaries of what is normal and taken for granted.

looking back, i know fine well that among the best things that happened were two significant moves, one when i was thirteen and then when i first arrived in glasgow in the mid-1990s.  both of them were difficult, often lonely and in many ways fraught as they threw myself back onto myself and myself only.

and alongside, they became about the social ways in which normality is constructed:

'this is how things are to be done'
became a
'this is how some people like to do things in this place and in this time'.

office for sale

so, my thinking of the things i do not need is whispering to me: you leaving academia is going to be alongside those two moves one of the best things you've ever done. it's a quiet whisper currently, but it's been getting louder as i'm busy cancelling taken for granted unpaid administrative chores, begin to ignore esteem indicators and the 'must-do' calls... all taken for granted, for normal, as the things one cannot do without.

... in this particular place and time.

leaving that particular place, time and institutional context is making that explicit. and even if it is going to be only for a short time, i'm excited by my tax return, the mindmap of future work for the year and the fact that i now worked out a day rate for my work.

boundaries? made by people, mostly. need a good go at stretching, extending and if sensible, ignoring.

Paul McCarthy The Painter

is currently on display in a wooden box in Edinburgh's Dean Gallery. the wooden box is situated within their permanent room of the Paolozzi Studio, a sedate, if busy, still life assemblage of Eduardo Paolozzi's studio.

the box in which the film is screened on a loop is temporary, two temporary seats propped in two corners, the sound is poor. people came in, watched a bit, quickly left, an older couple left, came back for another look, came back again for another look. inside the wooden box, the busy noises of the gallery were constant.

education of contemporary art, in particular its means of productions, its economy and how it produces individual genius out of shit, who in turn inhabit the squalor. the box inside the studio as deliberate education too: look at what we can do by setting up a provocation, of creating a tension between two representations of art production.

4 3 minute wonders

they come by way of another film by luke fowler (bogman palmjaguar, 2007, currently on display the national gallery of modern art in edinburgh).

i spent a fair bit of time organising what it was that i've been doing with art in past, presence and future - how the formality of application procedures enframes the telling of a coherent story. in doing so, i stumbled again across the white room and my circling around it as an unfinished project. unfinished or in progress? these four glasgow tenement interiors are curiously related to the white, uninhabitated - or only at points inhabiated flat in berlin. they are fragmented, they are titled by people, these never appear, only in possession and the spaces they inhabit. hm... thinking... circling...

for today? honey!

Either in cartoon form,

or as music...

or: both?

soon: some art.

and for the new:

something in black. something incidental. someone will know*.

let's make it a very good 2010.

*target temperature was at -5.5C

and the year ends

... with a movie that k and i designated for each other independently. only she had already found a screening for tonight. in halberstadt. the place where my granny moved to, aged 14, to start her apprenticeship, in 1934. never been there. so, it'll be soul kitchen in halberstadt tonight.

before: a bit of bruecke - erich heckler at the feininger gallery in quedlinburg.

and, for the road... this one, (and some bastardfairies, i predict).

have a very good year end and all good things for the new one. see you there.

if in doubt

... say nothing. or: take a field and a winter sky.

'innocent juxtapositions'

i'm thinking to myself as i go hunting for last week's viewing schedule on youtube...

(a) the repository of love (aka piles of chapati, lovingly baked by ones family to support ones career) from channel 4's school of saatchi

... a shame that the mould wasn't part of the design but evidence of uk privatisation and disinvestment in infrastructure...

(b) a uk arts programme some 15 years ago: anselm kiefer's operation sea lion. it comes in seven parts, just watch one after the other.



anselm kiefer: more... today, tomorrow, or the day after to get another spin for the fields of northern germany. so thoroughly german and somber. so material in space.

larchwood in high winds

disaster at sea. three plates. a rope. the christmas movie.

antisocial_notworking

i've been having a little debate with this project space by project.arnolfini... just in time for the holidays...

it landed on my desk thanks to variant's exchange with springerin and a recent article against social networking, here.

it resonates with my facebook wall, the information it pushes out to me to read of strangers and friends, the ones that i put into other people's faces and all social relations it generates, modifies and hides.

antisocial_notworking is also one of the coolest combinations of some of my own academic work on labour process, politics and moral panics over young people.

here's something for you:

Without politics, our friendships are empty of meaning and our exchanges lead to nothing but the commodification of life itself...

Furthermore, as labour time has become more difficult to measure and is less distinct from time outside work, much of it now practised as 'nonwork', outside of traditional production processes - 'notworking' as opposed to networking. The confusion over what constitutes work and non-work turns attention to situations where work takes the forms of nonwork. (Geoff Cox, 2008, Antisocial Applications: Notes in support of antisocial notworking)

now... where was the list of reference's, t told me about in september. immaterial labour etc...

now, ad 2, what does this mean for our social networking? signing up to hatebook? becoming invisible again? diverting, subverting, appropriating...

still debating...

The normality of space and time

i went to the office yesterday. i'm not there much anymore. i mostly work from home now or in coffeeshops. and it's very enjoyable this way. so, yesterday, i circulated between coffeeshop, office, different coffeeshop, office, coffeeshop 1 again, and then the office again.

michelle and i had been finalising an application to do with professional practice, concerns over who knows, who learns and who teaches. and what these in turn mean for us working as urban researchers and/or artists. we talked about methodology - about different ways of seeing, experiencing and thus learning.

so, later in the day i realised, after ordering coffee that i was without my money - must have left it in the office. j and i stayed for more coffee and some wine and i had to go and pick up my money. it wasn't late, but very dark. i went to my new office - which is shared now with two postgraduates. it was well past five o'clock, and there was light. one of my new office colleagues was working away - too much to do and too little time to finish it.

and it struck me: how quickly ways of doing become routine become normality. it is so long that i was in my office after 5.30 or indeed on the weekend. and yet both things were normality for all the time i was doing my phd. in fact, i remember fondly evenings spent in office, with breaks for coffees outside and ending in a late film at the gft with my office mates.

i've had this sense of estrangement a lot over the past two months. suddenly, my routines of being in glasgow's west end is thoroughly changing. i find myself in locations after midnight and am lost as to how to get home. stuff i knew six, seven years ago and seem to have forgotten. oh: this is what you can also do.

turning up in the office out-of-hours reminded me of some lushness of other times, other rythms. fair enough: some of these were utterly exhausting, they were marked by anxiety over whether my last 2000 words were any good, marked by no money for the film screening and much more.

learning: step outside, beside, below or next to whatever you're doing. do not take it for granted. watch, observe and listen carefully for all that seems so common. for it is not: common.

a bit of wonky moon in early evening by way of illustration, on way to coffee for free: