Tuesday, March 24

I talk to... NIKA

age: 23
nationality: 'I'm from many places'
type of visitor: occasional
eating: smoked salmon wrap
drinking: jasmine tea


Every few weeks I notice her in the cafe, and wonder who she is, and ponder what she's doing.

She's very distinctive looking, and always works with a concentration so intense that I don't like to interrupt. But this time I talk to her, and find she's happy to chat.

I discover she's a sculptor, Nika Kupyrova. She's drumming away on a laptop in a cafe, rather than doing quirky 3-dimensional things in dank studios, because she's working on a funding application for a new installation. In the arts world, people are making tedious funding applications pretty much continuously; some enterprising artist should make an application for an art work that involves the continuous filling in of funding applications.

A graduate of Edinburgh College of Art, Nika lives in Glasgow. Her focus as an artist is on photography and space-based work, using found objects in particular. "My work glamorises domesticalities, offers a peep-show insight into a fictional habitat, lingers over routines, eccentricities and homemade erotica".

I rather like this image / installation, called pigeon. And there's a rather spooky clip of her installation keep here....

Saturday, March 14

You don't see... PANTS

It was windy today and I saw pants from the window of my second-floor flat - an imposing array of them, flapping in a stiff Edinburgh breeze. I left them out of this photograph in case I was arrested, so you don't see pants. But you do get to see washing in the wind...

I'm not fond of washing - stuffing it into the machine, hauling it out, wrestling with giant, sodden duvet covers. Nor do I approve of windy days - they blow my bicycle in front of buses, and they make my ears ache. Wind is bad, as far as I'm concerned, and when I'm concerned even farther than that then I find that washing is worse. But washing in the wind? It's one of the loveliest sights. It plants a bulb of hope in my moment.

postscript:
The washing and changing of duvet covers is a sub-category of washing so dolorous that it makes me whimper. Simon Armitage (the very good English poet, as in, probably the best English poet alive, damn him) has a poem called 'Alaska' in which the sapping horror of duvet-cover-care is nicely rendered:

...but let me say, girl,
the only time I came within a mile

of missing you
was a rainy Wednesday, April,
hauling in the sheets,
trying to handle
that big king-sizer...


Thursday, March 12

Today's elephant...

These two elephants stare at each other perpetually. They're probably in love, but can do nothing about it. There are some advantages in such an arrangement, as John Keats said in his Ode on a Grecian Urn, when he consoles two lovers fixed forever on the surface of a vase...

Bold lover, never, never can you kiss,
though winning near the goal - yet do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though you have not your bliss,
Forever will you love, and she be fair!

The general idea is expressed in another line in the poem: Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / are sweeter...

Wednesday, March 11

I update... MAKI HAMADA'S EXHIBITION

I blogged about occasional Elephant House waitress and always amazing artist Maki Hamada on February 6th. Her solo exhibition at the Peter Potter Gallery in Haddington continues for just two more weeks - all details, plus my response to her work, are here.

Her works have been selling well, but there are still some left. In any case, it's a spectacular exhibition, and Haddington makes for a lovely day trip.

Monday, March 9

Poetry reading - 25th March

who: Mike Stocks & Helena Nelson
where: The Scottish Poetry Library, Edinburgh
when: 7.30p.m., 25th March
how much: £5 (£3 concessions)


If you'd like to hear me read from my books FOLLY and SONNETS, and say hello, then come along to the Scottish Poetry Library (see photo, google map here) at 7.30p.m. on Wednesday 25th March.

I'll be reading with award-winning poet Helena Nelson - her book STARLIGHT ON WATER won the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. Her latest pamphlet is called UNSUITABLE POEMS.

Helena's poetry - like mine, I hope - is approachable and appealing. In fact some of it - like mine, I fear - is said to be "quirky and satirical, not for the faint-hearted or under-10s..."

Helena runs the excellent Happenstance Press with incredible verve - if you write or read poetry, take a look - and she is editor of Sphinx magazine.

Sunday, March 8

I go to see... WENDY AND LUCY

film: Wendy and Lucy
director: Kelly Reichardt
where and when: The Cameo till Thursday March 12th, and then at the Filmhouse from March 27th

In this careful, sometimes ponderous, always subtle film, a woman on the edge loses her dog and, er... Well that's about it. Technically it's a road movie - she's on the way to Alaska in her beat-up Honda Accord - but more accurately it's a pothole movie, because she gets stranded and goes nowhere. My companions were divided in their views. Two thought the film was dreary, pretentious tosh, and one thought it was meaningfully restrained...

Wendy loves her dog Lucy - I mean, they French kiss, as near as damnit. I'm not going to tell you if she finds the doughty pooch or not - you'll need a sliver of narrative tension to see you through that 1 hour and 20 minutes of hound loss - but to focus on the meagre plotline isn't really the point. Wendy and Lucy is an examination of the big gaps in the ideal of the American dream, personified in the closed, lonely, go-(not)-getting character of Wendy as she has a few strokes of bad luck and fails to grasp any good luck.

The story can approach a sort of featureless photo-realism - nothing much happens, often, and it's often in real time that the nothing much that doesn't happen, doesn't, um, happen. In other words, the tedium is authentically tedious. But of course everything is interesting ultimately, if we look ever more closely; even boredom.

My interest was held, most of the time - the acting is superb, modulated, achingly sad. So much context and information is held back from our understanding of the characters' impoverished interactions that the watching audience has to work out its own moral framework to place upon the plot's tiny premise.

For a good analysis of what's so good about the film, try this New York Times review; for an opposing argument, channel4.com puts the boot in, tenderly.

Friday, March 6

I talk to... MARTA

age: 23
nationality: Catalonia
type of visitor: occasional
eating: carrot cake

drinking:
cappuccino

Marta's appearance is bold and striking: blue fluffy cardigan, orange-and-yellow striped shirt, large and colourful jewellery. She chats readily about her training in print-making, and how she's in Scotland to improve her English. She hopes to go back to Catalonia to do post-graduate studies.

The red book she scribbles is her diary. She's been writing diaries since she was nine years old and unlike that impressive journal writer DEREK she goes back to them from time to time 'to discover how I've changed'.

I kept a diary as a twenty-year-old student. The contents were so idiotic that after a month I decided to burn it. For reasons which were perhaps not unconnected to being an idiotic twenty-year-old student, I burnt it indoors, in a metal wastepaper bin...

50 or so pages of A4 paper produce surprisingly high flames and much smoke. I picked the bin up to take it outside. I dropped the bin and yelped -- the bin was hot. Now there were burning papers all over the bedroom floor. I grabbed my dressing gown to beat down the flames and -- my dressing gown transformed into a fireball and quickly ceased to exist. It had been made of some highly flammable artificial fibre. Buckets of water were required, and lots of shouting...

After we finish talking, Marta goes back to her diary. I get the impression I am in it now.