+ all of the above

Well, I’m back from San Fran, with plenty of new shiny things (and a busted up elbow, but more to come on that later). Check out these freakin awesome badges from the folks over at Loyal Army and extra thanks to Katey for making me the badges on the spot!

So I’m off again. No posts at least until the end of the week, though you can follow me on twitter if you were really so inclined (now that I have an iPhone I can’t help but twitter occasionally). Expect photos of San Fran soon!

I’ve posted some photos from my Montreal trip over at Flickr. It’s a weird mix since I was quite ill and didn’t get out to shoot much, but I was able to grab a few good shots. Enjoy!

A lot can happen in a couple of weeks, and I’ve got the photos to prove it. I’ll be posting a few select ones here but I’ll be uploading them all over at my new flickr account: Man Killed (thanks go to Owen for the name, I hope you don’t mind but I heard you weren’t using it anymore…).

So I’m going from A to B and back again with a fair amount of detouring along the way. I’ll have lots of lovely pics when I return (I promise), but I doubt I’ll be posting anything until I get back.

I lost this badge yesterday. I think it was on the subway, but really it could have been anywhere. It was one of my favourites as it was larger than usual, about two or three inches wide, and it was made as a fundraising community art project for delinquent children and then sold at the ACMI gallery store in Melbourne. I just hope that someone finds it and enjoys it.

These were given to me by my very good friend George as part of a birthday present.

I had to share this. HEAVY SMOKIN’
via LP Cover Lover

If you’re in or nearby Brooklyn then I invite you to come out on Tuesday evening for the opening of the group photographic exhibition ‘Face First.’

This is exciting as it marks the first time I’ve had my work on display in NYC.
The flyer is here: Face First 03
And the details are:
Goodman Gallery
Tuesday August 12th
6pm to 9pm
311 Columbia Street, Brooklyn.

This is a photo taken during the 16 hours I spent on my stopover at Taipei, on my way to NYC.

Want to know something ridiculous? When I was a kid I used to worry about how to spell letters. I would say the letter and then I would write down how to spell it. This posed a problem however, the challenge being that I would then have to spell each letter in the word that I had just made to spell the letter. And so on. Ad Infinitum. I theorised that the way to solve the problem and defeat this damning loop of exponential letter growth was to spell a letter without using the letter itself, so that it’s existence was justified purely by its counterparts in the alphabet. The letter ‘A’ was encouraging and easy, ‘ey’ made short work of that. But then came the letter ‘B.’ Not so easy. A real challenge. However I began to think that even if I could spell each letter without the letter itself, what would that prove? The letters would be justifying each other by relying on each other. Even in my young mind I could see that the foundations weren’t solid on that logic. I needed a keystone, some firm foundation which everything else could logically flow from, some source of absolute alphabetical authority.

While I was never able to get any further with my letter proofs I think what this does prove is that if there was ever a boy in need of a nintendo it was me.

The picture below reminded me of those previously forgotten childhood thoughts. Unfortunately I do not know the origins of the picture, if anyone knows then please enlighten me.

All this touches on something that I have been thinking a lot about recently. Something to do with scale and perspective. I don’t rightly have it in verse in my head so bear with me as I try and communicate it. Possibly the best way to relate it is to tell another tale about my childhood. I used to have a recurring dream that was always different in subject but similar in style. I think it may have been a developmental artifact, my brain growing and learning and sometimes hiccuping. I would often dream as if everything was a close-up.

And not just a close-up. A close, close-up. What I would see would always be different, but I would always be so close that it was unsettling and vaguely uncomfortable. I would not be able to pull back or change my perspective in the slightest. Whatever small minutiae it was that my subconscious had decided to focus on would all of a sudden be of such infinite scale as to appear to be my entire reality. It was visceral and sensory. For all intents and purposes, while I dreamt, it was as expansive and as broad and as infinite as the concept of infinite space.

And like many of my dreams I would experience them during the waking hours as well. This may be because I have never had what you would call a normal pattern of sleep, but sometimes like a switch being flicked in the back of my brain I would be staring at some trivial thing and it would hit and I would stare. For barely a few seconds the feeling would take me, but suddenly my perspective would shift and the two rocks in soil that I was stuck staring at would become my entire world.

This is of course, an inadequate explanation. To convey it properly I would have to find some way of inducing it on you. And short of experimenting with hard drugs I’m not sure there is a way. I’d be interested to hear though if anybody had experienced something similar.

And so that is what I have been thinking of recently. The one letter filling the world with its spelling, and then the spelling of each letter in its spelling and the spelling of each letter in each of the letters of each of the spellings. Or the one small crack in the glass window which from a different perspective and scale is a vast and unforgiving chasm with tall sides and an unending series of twists and river bends. And this brings me to yet another thought, but I will leave it there.

These are a few photos from the start of the year and as you can see they are taken during the day (shock! horror!) so please forgive the divergence. They were taken on a location scouting mission for a photographer I was interning for, which was a hell of a lot of fun.

My favourite is the last shot, taken at a decrepit, aging park between two furniture factories. It had rusted old cars in a heap in the middle surrounded by park benches and as you can see, the park just about jutted right out over the east river and had an amazing view of Manhattan.

You know what they say in Brooklyn real estate? In Manhattan, you get a view of Brooklyn, but in Brooklyn you get a view of Manhattan.

Finally, some pieces from yours truly. I’m shifting gears at the moment and will be focusing a bit more on my personal work from now on, and this is the first result of that. Taken on a short jaunt around the industrial area behind my home in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

A friend of mine alerted me to a student exhibition in Canberra a year ago that had made badges of all the works on display. These two are quite small and are just fantastic.

Devo are playing at the park near my house. (as well as Gogol Bordello!)

I’ve just received my new computer, so I’ll be a bit busy over the next few days and probably won’t be posting much. I’m pulling all of my backed up data and re-organising everything. I’ll post a few links here and there but when I get back, expect some art.

I’m a big fan of recycled fabric badges and this is a great one. This one was bought from one of the many markets in London which I went to.

Because everyone needs one, I’ve never had one, and so I bought one from a punk in Camden.

Metric – Monster Hospital. I fought the war but the war won.

After the failure to prevent the war in Iraq by the largest amount of protesters in history, my frustrated acceptance that this brutal reality is actually happening has set in.

Will we bother to protest next time around?

Sometimes when I’m talking to myself I accidentally use phrases like ‘you and I both know,’ or ‘just between you and me’ and then I try and make myself believe that I thought that I was talking to someone else who must have left at some point.

Sometimes I even believe myself.

Not to be morbid or anything, but I was thinking about what I’d like put on my tombstone:

Errata:
Please disregard all of the below.

It’s my birthday and I’ll listen to Tommy Seebach if I want too…

Probably the most annoying thing about London is being told to Mind the Gap every time a train stops on the tube. If you’re on the platform you’re told by a man with a deep Scottish voice, if you’re on the train it’s a soft lady’s voice. You’re told about three to four times at each stop.

At most stops, there isn’t even a gap.

It’s all very British. So I had to buy a badge.

This is quite possibly the coolest badge I own. I’m almost afraid of saying that in case my other badges get jealous, but I think it might be true. Created for World Book Day, I found this in one of the best little stores I’ve ever seen, more on that later. For the uninitiated the quote is from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and is one of the most powerful lines in a very powerful book. I normally avoid badges with quotes or sayings on them, but this I couldn’t resist.

I’m almost afraid to open it. It’s still sitting on my shelf, waiting to be worn.

Meanwhile, Tom Hanks was cast as Montag? And then withdrew?

I have a lot of badges. And I intend on getting more. I’m gonna start posting them up here. Starting with this one.

It’s a badge from the V&A Museum in London, I bought it because like every other gallery gift shop it was full of beautiful but overpriced, useless crap. I couldn’t justify buying any of it until I found this. It caught my eye. It cost 60p and the lady tried to give me a plastic bag for it. After I bought this I went and sat on the bench out the front of the museum to wait for my sister (the museum and gift shop having just closed). I sat and pretended to read my book while I watched all the Londoners walk by. They’re all so polite.