December 25, 2002
For the paintings pages, wrote an afterthought on failing to earn bread from art in Berlin.


December 16
It's drizzling wet, but the sky's are clear.


December 15
The sky dropped into the sea today.


December 14
A ship transporting 3000 top of the range new cars has sunk in fog in the Channel off Dunkirk.

(Since then two ships, including a Greek tanker transporting poison, have crashed into the thing where it lay on its side, visible at the water's surface. 3.1.03)

November 8
Mum's at bingo or the opera. Dad's downstairs listening to organ music.
Trevor Macdonald is interviewing Mariah Carey in the kitchen.
I've been thinking about jobs again. There's a joke shop in Sandown High Street, I could see myself working there
BEFORE WE ARE ALL
DISCREETLY CONSUMED
IN THE FIRES OF WORLD WAR III
Could ask at White City if I can clean more ashtrays in the amusements arcade.
Could put an ad in the I.O.W. County Press and illegally decorate posh drawing rooms and toilets. Make this island trendy again.
Could get sponsorship to open an art workshop in London.
Could finally start oil painting in the garage.
Could be a pimp in Berlin.
Could buzz off to India.
Could sit right here and brainwash myself till the sun comes up...


November 5
Guy Fawkes - terrorist or tortured victim? Hero of passion or nut?
OR JUST ONE OF US
PUBLICLY TOSSED UPON
THE MERRY VILLAGE BONFIRE?
Bloody bits of each, like the rest of us, no doubt.


November 4
Mum and Dads' wedding anniversary. As with birthdays, the idea of time whizzing passed only depresses them, so little is celebrated.
Bought some shoes.
Drove through the country night to enjoy brutal murder in RED DRAGON. The original was better, but I'm in love with the killer's blind girlfriend. Didn't she act herself to death in a far scarier film BREAKING THE WAVES?


October 28
Idea for an installation:

A babies dummy, eight foot long, discarded in the middle of a sterile room.

Materials:
Ring-piece - semi-transparent moulded plastic - purple
Mouth-piece - condom rubber (patchwork technique)


October 27
Either kick them like a dirty habbit,
GBRLAANNDD IDEAS IDEAS
or slap them around the place.


October 26
Have come home for a while. A most important
CHAPTER in my life has unimpressively ended. I am fixing myself in a fresher place. Talking to the pilot on some plane (stoned again!),
yonks above the homeward stretch, I began to excercise my brain
washing abilities, needed for London. I told him
MAKE YOUR MIND A BLANK, AND WITHOUT OPENING YOUR EYES, RE-PAVE THE PATH WHICH LEADS TO YOUR HOME
that my search for financial and psychic stability was already over, as a better plan had once again hijacked my brain. He threw me out of the cabin. But he shall see that I roll with my punches! Employing techniques akin to straight talking, I shall now get my first book published.
AHA!
The title, Mr fat-hearted Publisher, shall be ironic and unoriginal:

The Perfect Life of an Artist

It shall be filled with more nonsense than even I should want to read. I shall run amok in Soho with an agenda and a mock-up of 170 pages, knocked out on Dad's colour printer - a page for each web page, voilà! That's a lot of printer ink, but ONCE I'm back on the dole, I'll be fifty quid a month richer than in Berlin. That's two colour cartridges, or ten portions of grey fish and chips.
Of course, I could use Corinne's muscles in a general way; and the Pandora's box of forgotten files locked in her computer. If I hypnotize her on the phone, she might leave poor Borek alone for a while and drive some things over. My fake leather coat, mainly. We should chat. I want to publish the witty Asian prostitute page I made for her. She asked me to remove the phone number, UPON which I removed the whole thing in a huff. But I know she'll agree to it going into mass print.

Will need some new shoes.
There never was A simpler plan.

(Plan later abandoned)

Richard Harris just died.

TIME to TURN THE PAGE


September 26
Have returned to the Island after caking the walls of Timur's new restaurant with umpteen layers of green porridge paint, to his apparent satisfaction, if not to mine. Will continue my extended holiday and, when I go up with James to house-sit next week, I shall glance around London to satisfy myself that the greatest metropolis in Europe will never yield the job to suit my narrow needs. As usual, the impossible terms I demand will be:

no paperwork
no uniform (no pleated trousers, no bow-tie, no goggles)
no non-creative stress (non-creative stress is acceptable if it culminates in the mass production of, say, wine-gum flavored contact-lenses*)
money

I asked Timur if I might work behind the sexy new bar he has built. It almost cost him his sanity and his marriage, on top of the 200,000 Istanbul euros and 10,000 beer cans consumed by 300 lazy asylum-seekers (sacked one after the other and re-directed to other great Berlin building-sites. "Alle Betrüger! Alle Betrüger!"). The bar is wonky in places but massive (I am a fan of anything massive) so it would suit my enormous reach. I even offered to do something in the kitchen, but Timur refused out of hand. A synopsis of the terrifying months spent slaving for drunken British and Irish builders at the Kilkenny Pub under the railway arches reminded myself, and convinced him, that I was barking down the wrong job-track again.

J. K. Toole's Ignatius J. Reilly reckoned:

"I doubt very seriously whether anyone will hire me."
"What do you mean babe? You a fine boy with a good education."
"Employers sense in me a denial of their values. You must realize the fear and hatred which my weltanschauung instills in people."
"You can get a good job. Wait till they see a boy with a master's degree."
Ignatius sighed heavily and said, "I see no alternative." He twisted his face into a mask of suffering. "You realize, of course, that this is all your fault. The progress of my work will be greatly delayed. However, I may have some valuable insights which may benefit my employer. Perhaps the experience can give my writing a new dimension. Being actively engaged in the system which I criticize will be an interesting irony in itself."
"Here, listen to this. I been seeing this ad in the paper every day," Mrs Reilly said, holding the newspaper very close to her eyes. "'Clean, hard-working, dependable, quiet type...'"
"Good God! What kind of monster is this that they want. I am afraid that I could never work for a concern with a worldview like that."
"Read the rest, babe."
"'Clerical work. 25-35 years old. Apply Levy Pants, Industrial Canal and River, between 8 and 9 daily.' Well, that's out. I could never get all the way down there before nine o'clock."
"Honey, if you gonna work, you gotta get up early."
"No mother." Ignatius threw the paper on top of the oven. "I have been setting my sights too high. I cannot survive this type of work. I suspect that something like a newspaper route would be rather agreeable."
"Ignatius, a big man like you can't peddle around on no bike delivering newspapers."
"Perhaps you could drive me about in the car and I could toss the papers from the rear window..."

(* Krisztina liked to suck my eyeballs.)


August 30
I live well when I sleep, among an aristocracy of dreams. I can't blame myself for being exhausted the rest of the time.

" If my vision is true and I am doomed to be reincarnated as a fish in my next life,
I shall journey to the nudist beach where you take your holidays
and swim up into you, to live in your womb..."

SKIP TO POETRY SCHOOL

August 6
Walked with James to Shanklin and an audience with elusive cousin Russell at his flat above the party shop. Drank beer and heavily smoked in the lilac living room, but mostly just listened to the man we hadn't seen since we were holiday kids - refugees from London. Even then, Russ had been older, and belonged to the island, not us.
Working as a chef, he has cruised the world on luxury liners. (Returning to the Q.E.II from shore-leave at New York, he got busted and fired.) He has witnessed miracles during cultic initiation ceremonies in India; and has an interest in some spiritual version of quantum physics. James said later, 'I got lost a couple of times, but it didn't matter, as he has a way of bringing you back into the conversation.' He asked me if I had believed every word. 'I believe he saw and did all the things he said he saw and did,' I wisely replied. On leaving, we joked we would all meet again after another twenty years, but I suspect it will be sooner. He doesn't receive many visitors and seems to live a reclusive, happy life on this little island. Most importantly, he and his girlfriend, Julie, are very much in love.
Decided to explore the skill, or state of mind, of projecting ones self to visit friends in far away places. On Russell's advice, I should try not to frighten anyone.
'I guess it works best when the people are very close, like lovers, or twins?' I suggested. He agreed.
Later on, homeward bound, alone and stoned, walking some fifty yards behind a local lad (but a stranger to me), I concentrated on throwing myself forward, to hover up close, perhaps to peer over his shoulder and into his face. I kept my eyes unblinking on the target for a hundred yards or more. It was a half-hearted effort - I think I was drunk, too - and he didn't get spooked, or even look back. Having almost caught up, courtesy of my long shanks, I was able to get a good look at his filthy trainers and the pattern of his nancy-boy shirt. Then he turned into Brownlow Road, and I began to pull myself together and sober up, if at all possible, for the homely arrival. As I turned the same corner just seconds after, there was the lad, now fifty yards ahead again, ducking into the doorway which swallowed him for the night.
I imagine he had sprinted that last stretch, as I often do.


July 26
Cleaning amusement arcades now, each morning on the pier, or at Wight City further down the front towards the dinosaur museum and seedy tiger zoo. Have to switch myself off as the machines come on, all at once. Just get on with it, empty the ashtrays, polish a hundred slot-machines -
ignoring the merciless breakfast-time barrage of 'Oh I do like to be beside the sea-side!', 'What shall we do with the drunken sailor?', football crowds chanting, penny cascades flowing, video-zombies shrieking, Star Wars blasting, animals grunting, gun shots, alarm bells, a phone that never stops ringing; one bloody thing which yells my name, catching me out every time
- crammed in a hot hole stuffed with candy-sucking, fag-scattering holidaymakers.
Apart from old soldier Frank, riding the Hoover at seventy-one and treated like a bit of crap, the people working there are truly morose.
It's the first time in an age that I'm out of bed at a ridiculous hour doing meaningless, exhausting work, looking forward only to pay-day. Eezy peezy. Can't say I like it, though, earning a living. Even if it is doing me good. Emptying bins is heavy work for a malnourished pansy.

James and I play pool in the jolly pubs, or a civilised game of snooker at St. Margarets, the converted church complete with bar and mini-disco. Sometimes we find ourselves on the set of The Slaughtered Lamb. Still, a healthy change from city excesses - I suppose.
It's an incestuous island, like all islands. Everybody knows everybody's business. Who shags who, who's a junky, or a suspected paedophile; who's in the money, who almost murdered who, years ago. The foulness of the language some of the ladies use must be heard to be believed. Enough to raise fond memories of all-nighters with the boys in a South London model-making sweat-shop.
It's whispered that in Ventnor, a third of the residents are under some form of mental-health care.
But these things don't show, or even matter, on a typically glorious, summer's day.

What does show is the jealousy of so many Englishmen in 'respect' to their women. In Berlin, we eye up the ladies, drink their health, and chat them up usually regardless of the guys they happen to have arrived with. A dubious habit, probably, but mostly harmless, mostly leading to nothing. Everyone plays. To do the same in this country is to flirt on a daily basis with a broken nose or far worse. (Ask James to count his nasty scrapes in London over the years, and the common cause.) It's usual to see a couple having a drink, but unable to have fun, due not only to the price of warm beer and stupid licensing hours. Look along the bar at all those men, eyes darting about, psyching out any bloke who looks for more than a second his hard-earned spouse. And arrogance, to boot! A drunken lad the other night, oblivious to all but his own brilliance, proposed to his squirming girlfriend during his karaoke turn in the packed pub. I guess she accepted, but it was hard to tell. I thought she looked like she wanted the cellar to collapse and swallow her forever, but I could be wrong. In any case, they'll get married, he'll become the nasty-tempered king of his castle, he'll carve her slowly but surely into a cold bitch, while she smokes and drinks and does her best, or worst, to cater for the children.

James and I have got to know one another during this visit. Separated now, he's down here like me, a walking-wounded on a cushy number. Had his own heart broken, big time, for once. Still suffers from mood-swings. Another alcoholic who can't see the causes of his woes. Unfortunately, dad detests drunkenness, due to a childhood spent in the shadow of our grandad, the wife-bashing gypsy.
But between upsets, James is getting on, in his way, as I am in mine. Got his kids Sammy and Sophie down for the holidays. The quiet ones.

Horrible news. A young Danish exchange student was found strangled, locally, a few days ago. She went to sit at her favourite beauty-spot on Brading Down, which really is lovely, before joining friends at a beach party in Sandown. She didn't turn up. Somehow, everyone feels the jolt, feels the loss.

Looking forward to returning to Desert Island Berlin, somewhere between Louise's wedding, and Bob and Simonas' wedding in Prague.

July 14
Updated Big Chairs with pretty prototype photos taken at Los Altos, the park at the end of Brownlow Road.
Dad, the great walker, has never seen the stone steps folly hidden in the trees at the back there.


July 12
Watched BEING JOHN MALKOVICH again, then worked on Sofa Sponge
(think of the 'portal').


July 9
C leaned the pier this morning.


July 8
Went for a short walk along the front, today, in the drizzle and fog.


June 30
Hello C,

Thought you might be interested in this ARTICLE about new reasons not to eat chips, or anything else fried or cooked at high temperatures.

Will stay on the Island another month, if not more. Feeling much better - problems understood and hopefully solved, TOUCH A WOODEN GOD. Have been suffering for years from malnutrition. Slow starvation due to poverty, lethargy and depression - completely overseen, misdiagnosed or ignored by three otherwise very nice doctors.

Will need not only a room when I get back, but also a job (JOB=MONEY+FOOD).
Will do pretty much anything. BUT I WON'T DO THAT.
Am sharing a job at the moment with James, cleaning on Sandown pier - 6 a.m. start! Working with some bingo-biddy friends of mum's. A doddle. Only one problem - too many tea breaks filled with biddy-yap.

Remind me, when is Bob's wedding?

How are you?
How's our baby?

P.

"The waves were breaking well over the angler's outermost platform to roll shoreward beneath our feet, bursting up through the gaps in the old boards. In the next town, Shanklin, there's a memorial to their own pier which went down in such a storm when we were kids..."

READ HOLIDAY POSTCARD

22 May
MEANWHILE, BACK IN BERLIN...

I don't make enough art or love.
I make up for it, with Kate Bush-flavoured pyramidy cream on top, by thinking of nothing else.
I've grown unhappy here, but only for one silly, superficial reason.


3 February
Found glass in my pillow, again, this morning.


25 December, 2001
It occurs to me, more often than once, that the answer to
LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING
is Death - not 44 plus a Babelfish. Never-the-less:

I was chased throughout the night
half naked through the rain
till they got me in the face
with that blunderbuss again!

Often condemned to die in my sleep,
I awake just then, to my relief, or annoyance.
Sometimes though, I am killed outright,
only to seamlessly switch characters,
and carry on as someone else.

Yet more proof that DEATH IS NOT THE END


8 September
Andreas says, the world is exactly the way the world is - the past, the present, could not be any other way. Take it or leave it.
I croak: "The future, the future!"


19 July
IF YOU CAN'T DO IT RIGHT, DO IT WRONG,
EITHER WITH STYLE, OR IN FRONT OF AN AUDIENCE.

Strange events at La Fabrik workshops in the shape of the first Kunstfleisch auction. Some lively criticism, to which I could only reply, you shall remember this silliness for long years to come. Agreement all round, I think.
In this picture, only half the paintings have been put out, probably due to rain. Later they were wrapped in Clingfilm.

31 December, 2000
A marvelous year it has been for the grey squirrel!


25 December
Jesus was a tall man
jesus was a proud man
jesus was a dead man
who lived upon the cross


14 December
Not that I know a thing about politics. Don't have the brains for it, nor the stomach. Diplomacy, on the other hand, I know plenty about. I know I'm rubbish at it, always have been, always will be. Disagree? Sodya!


13 December
Does Schröder think he's kidding anybody diverting that gang of drug baron warlords from his precious Hauptstadt Berlin over to Bonn? Of course, no-one cares if Bonn goes up in a cloud of atomic anthrax. I was looking forward to seeing some Afghanis in the skin. The contrast knob on our TV is broken and they all look so tanned and well fed... more

has anyone seen the shadow of my squirrel?

Decided not to finish the painting. Forget the shadows. If I wait for the shadows I'll wait for as long as the painting hangs unfinished on the wall.
Have decided not to finish anything. Shall simply write 'unfinished story number...' or

'UNFINISHED PAINTING No...'

BAD WORDS

How many uncountable times have I bogged myself down re-vamping again and again, over and over, the ghost of a text which angrily lurks half living, half gasping into my weeping ears, damp wads of nonsense dragged forth from some dodgy plot beyond the Neverworld? (God! What is it? What is this thing?) Polished off a lifetime ago, tis surely the gut of a pretty book: born, butchered and buried there with the others, in near secrecy, near the summit of my fog-shrouded brain. This awful sleepless thing, writing, is digging in midnight grave-mud and laying out in a lofty, fast-sinking chain any bits and bobs which are randomly spewed from the bowels. And Allah bless the stony-faced angels when a splatter of gold, even fool's gold, is rescued from the churning crud! Obnoxious fairy-tales, druggy rantings, cynical love yarns, benefits forms; these and worthier besides, excruciatingly Frankensteined together out of O'level grammar and wrongish spelled words. Maths, I failed; but I can count seventeen endless pages of a weirdish novel colourfully named 'Ark of Colours' which, if I pull a darkly stained finger out, might miraculously evolve into the sun-set of a pop-up comic-book: a thing to present to myself upon retirement or death.

Shall I ever meet, in this life or in the next, my comatose cousins Felix & Phyllis in the palid-pale flesh, at peace of a late bednight upon the mass-produced page? Oh, how I yet miss them. However; nothing much dribbled or spat from my creeking leaking pen ever seems finishable, let alone sellable, let alone readable. Very few bits and bobs from the odds-&-sods bin ever have been, or no doubt will be - will they? Technically, a lot of rubbish pops up. Thankfully, it's not all usable. Just occasionally, a phrase will scream up from the dirt to flatter the memory of my dear, long-departed mother concept. Then where am I left? Knee deep in swell ideas, mostly dead above the neck.

Agreed then. Much hard shoveling for a few bad words.

Lo! It is these ideas only I fear, living and hauntingly choreographed as dream sequences in a quaint old horror film, which remain contiguous and precious; pitiably, forever incarcerated within the socky murk, all six feet and so many inches beneath the very peak of my moon-howling mind!

Neil looked up one day to say, 'You are not a writer,' then asked once again, proddingly, in the storming rain and more ominous thunder, 'Why don't you stick to painting?'
Yet he may be a man of many valid points and barbs, but I write up my sleeve with swelling confidence in his direction, 'Fuck you, man.'

Alternately, poetry is no absolute waste of time. A fool can write a poem. I hope to fill a book one day - if I ever finish one. Even a skinny one! OK. But a successful poem, even a humorous one, is poor compensation for not having it in the genes, or perhaps the balls, to write something containing better quality meat.
Oh, to get something - payment perhaps, in this modernish world, even something at the impoverished level of the spirit - for all those long hours tossed away, spent digging away at this, my most perfectly crafted neck-ache!

Exactly thus, I began to carve the merest synopsis out of the vision of my famous unwritten 'Novel of Colours'. I do hope to complete it sometime, perhaps before the manuscript itself arrives, chained-up and conspicuously marvelous, on Terry Gilliam's doorstep with the milk bottles and a witty note of desperation. For no fable born of this day can dazzle the contemporary planet till it is churned into a massive, disappointing film by an over-enthusiastic, badly-dressed, hairy-faced director. As for the synopsis: well, I rapidly got bogged down again in the bog of little details like Felix's fungus collection, the colour of the last-surviving rabbit; and how to justify the second half of a rueful, meandering, possibly unnecessary, over-long sentence - leave well alone (I know the reader will) a single, brooding, poetic, lonely, misinterpreted, failed and desperate paragraph!

Which leads me to a reincarnated life; one in which I am blessed with more or less average portions of physical energy and/or financial motivation. In one such shadowless life, I might just turn to directing quaint old horror films as a means of shocking my poor ideas into warmly chuckling existence.

To expand for a moment; let us bow our heads beyond neck-pain and remember the film Bucket, in which our hero (Neil again) walked the length of Schönhauser Street with his head in a coal bucket. With a bathroom towel wrapped around his head to keep the bucket on, he would fail to hear that fateful crash, as he barged his unforgettable path among the shoppers and those startled weekend dogs. A childish attempt to manufacture a blockbuster, I cannot deny, or even say. But experiment is the main thing, sometimes a jolly thing; though it must be noted that the abrupt end of that scene killed the project, and perhaps a by-stander, who unfortunately ran in front of Bob's astonished camera into the road of an on-coming truck. Shortly thereafter, creeping paranoia sent the whole crew sneaking into a coffee-shop to remove from the scene the bucket and compare wide eye-balls.

Neil's audition at police headquarters is a better story, but wasn't filmed, nor ever resolved. Not by us, anyhow. In Hollywood, perhaps, one dreadful day.

Directing? I had better been off directing traffic!

But to write! God! To write like a writer! Or like a God! Or even like a rotter like that toe-rag Miller, or some other popularist, unshaven, woman-knowing body. And to spell the words correctly first time around and have them spill out in fairly good order, cascading fluidy through the rainbow of my mouth to end up within spitting distance of the perfect ending, close to the bottom of the very last page!

Honestly, I seriously imagines I've a rare and nobbling iq-pissabling pyslexia of some orrible de-scribling!

Visit the LIBRARY of BAD IDEAS.

Extracted from:
1001 WAYS TO BE A FASHIONABLE ARTIST

At a gruesomely historic benefits party thrown up at Culture Castle, a shirtless, ticketless, legless young Noname is doomed to spurt unto the universe a boggling picture of itself never before imagined - knocked out in cheap oils, signed across its breadth, crammed into a handy frame.
On his journey to the great unveiling the future master of Artyfarty World would meet two mates; one in a dirty great limo, one in a dirty great pit.
But way back there in the beginning, in his weedy hovel overlooking Waterloo Railway Station, Noname's existence was suspected only among his two enormous brothers, Bigbeard Hammer and Littlebeard Sneak. Risen from the urban bog, these towering symbols of Ego and Bull were irresistible to stick-shaped women and bendy, oily, voyeuristic men. Both were ugly and mad as the hats they wore. Corrupt, ruthless and inseparable, but above all fashionable, they were the original Wonderlads. And praise the King and Jesus, his destiny at last over-filled, Noname would be the last!

Time jump #17 (of 300)
Big brother Bigbeard had once been a headstone-mason. A self-made local hero, he was also the live chicken-devouring mascot of The Early Worm pub. During a headstone flinging tournament (a sport of his own invention) he propositioned the ugliest daughter of a wealthy cockney, with a mind to do them out of an already tainted fortune. The matrimonial deal was struck upon the Father-in-law-to-be's return from a business trip during which he had suffered two heart-attacks, been shot in both thumbs at a boxing match and, significantly, inherited from an old pal the deepest black marble quarry ever bashed out of the planet. After Dad's unexpected demise, Bigbeard's first wife shortly capitulated. Upon wooing and wedding the remaining ugly daughters, one atop the other in rapid romantic fashion, Bigbeard Hammer soon occupied a manor all of his own. The parties quickly grew infamous...

Time jump #202
The confession of the narrowest life-history in history is rudely interrupted by the arrest of the only survivor of the most popular case of mass-murder to have awoken a media normally concerned with slimming celebrity prostitutes for many a month. Now, kneeling in his late brother's luxury jail cell, eyebrows glued to the leather-padded writing desk, Noname's head never-the-less spins around twice before the real penny drops...

...evidence being assembled...
...evidence being assembled...

Time jump #298
From this awful moment until the last awful moment of his inexplicable existence, Noname sees his life paraded jerkily across the tilted horizon as a series of smudgy Polaroid snaps taken within a recurring nightmare, with no fully wakeful periods in-between. Conditions improve however - until the dope wears off. Far too late he remembers the vital, sumptuous, fateful half-hour edited from his brain by that undercover Judas who had knocked up, and pulled off, The Big Frame...

"So fret not, like an idle girl,
That life is dash'd with flecks of sin.
Abide: thy wealth is gather'd in,
When Time hath sunder'd shell from pearl."

TENNYSON


"Pretty as a poke among damsels!"

WALLYWOODS AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT

15 June, 2000
Oh, sadnesses!

Mine inwardy organs and downish features 'as been kidnapped a-long, long off. But I failed to keep and get her, in slow motion, even; near that pretty mound. So I be all over now, and slowly growing better? Bye 'n bye? Don't you reckon! Needs me a potion, I does, quick as pain. A tonic, a whiskey; a bullet in a rock. Quick! Quick! Quickish! Quick! I knows what I does! I gonna go a-paint some!!!

Continue to 1999 - 1987

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