Category: [My stuff]

Art for art’s sake

Someone posted this on Mastodon:

…and I found it immensely amusing because I’ve actually kind of been in the latter situation:

I produced this at the ripe old age of “3yrs 5mths” per the tag at the bottom, which must make it from March or April 1978. Deteriorated over the years, obviously, but you can still get a sense of whatever the hell it was I was trying to do. My no doubt proud parents hung it up when I got home from kindergarten with it, where some family friends saw it when they visited:

“Oh, have you been investing in modern art?”
“No, the boy did that at kindergarten the other day.”
“…Oh.”

But the really funny thing is that, many years later, I was reading a book about 20th century and was kind of struck by one image that had a similar sort of… streaky aspect to the colours, I don’t know a better way to describe it, as what my picture did. I can’t remember what the actual artwork in question was now, but I did note that the effect was produced by a technique called decalcomania, and though it apparently goes back to the 1700s it gained new life in the middle of the last century thanks to the Surrealists. I can’t remember any more how I made my own masterpiece, but it must’ve been something like decalcomania. So there you go, I used a surrealist technique without even knowing it was one; not even being aware that you’re doing surrealism must be about as surrealist as you can get…

And the hat is done

Oh, here’s one of my own photos found during this archival trawl:

June 2013, Killing Joke were playing in Sydney for the first time in a decade, and this was my first live encounter with them. I was, alas, between camera at the time, my trusty old Nikon Coolpix having died the year before and I still hadn’t invested in its replacement, so I was stuck using my rather shitty phone camera. The shots I got were, needless to say, inadequate at best, but I love this one anyway… cos someone down on the floor of the Metro near the stage was sufficiently moved for whatever reason to toss their hat into the air, and somehow I managed to press the button just in time to catch it while it was still airborne.

Greetings from Carcosa

I was browsing Tumblr the other night and came across someone’s post that quoted “Cassilda’s Song” from The King in Yellow, and for some reason I wondered what might result if I ran it through an AI art generator. Here’s one of the results:

This is the first thing that mage.space threw at me, and I find something weirdly evocative about it. I’ve played about with mage.space a fair bit and I’ve occasionally got… interesting results, but rarely good ones. This might be the best I’ve got so far. I mean, maybe if I weren’t cheap and actually paid a bit for one of these AI things, I might get more “realistic” results (like the famous Pope in a Balenciaga jacket picture)… but, like I say, I’m cheap. There’s some things I’m happy to pay for but this AI nonsense isn’t one of those things.

And even this still looks like AI, doesn’t it? I see a lot of this shit on Instagram, it infests some of the hashtags I follow on that, and even the OK stuff is still… obviously AI (even the Pope picture does once you know that it is). It’s not the same as digital art that’s actually had a human hand in it; even if said human hand was just moving a mouse to drag pixels across a screen rather than drawing on a tablet, it’s still an actual person making the ultimate decisions… whereas pretty much all the AI-created stuff has a kind of sameness to it. It’s kind of characterless and dull. And I think that image I posted above wound up being good in spite of itself (the other images I got from that prompt were much less interesting)…

Arachne

I threatened a while ago to post an example of my own poetic… whatever, and with it being World Poetry Day I suppose it’s time I finally did that. Without further ado…

“It’s not that big,” he said. The hell it’s not,
I thought right back while hovering at a distance.
It’s not that big? The size is irrelevant
When you’re the sort of arachnophobe I am.
My housemate’s not, and that’s an excellent thing
At times like this when I need his assistance,
But I don’t think he quite gets how it feels
To have this evolutionary error
Somehow make its way into your house
And lurk unnoticed, not even suspected.
It was cunningly concealed behind the curtain,
Up on the back door frame, and visible
Only from an angle lying down
Upon the couch, or else I’d never have seen
The hint of arachnid leg, the bit of body
That “wasn’t that big” but didn’t have to be,
Because even if I had seen bigger ones,
It was big enough and it was in my room.

We brought the vacuum cleaner through the back
To suck our intruder up, but it had moved:
And then we saw it scuttle to the ceiling
And then fall down, and lose itself again
Among the rustling curtain…  “There it is,”
He said as the fucking thing shot right behind me,
And paused upon my shoe just long enough
For him to draw it into the vacuum stick.
That was closer than I would’ve liked.

I hate arachnophobia, and I know
Just how irrational it is, and that
There’s little that I really need to fear;
I probably scared the spider somewhat more
Than it scared me. But I don’t particularly care;
It’s irrational, but that’s why it’s a phobia,
Not just a vague dislike of eight-legged things.
And so I suppose it’ll keep getting in my way
Whenever the next one comes inside to play.

So, that’s “Arachne”, offered here for what it may be worth, written in September 2021, and yes it was written after a close encounter with one of Ungoliant’s offspring in my room. (Parenthetically, Joe, my housemate, got one in his room a few nights ago, as I discovered when I heard him let loose a loud “WAAAAAARGH!”; Joe copes with spiders much better than I do, but get one big enough—as this one apparently, even he conceded it was “huge” and I’m happy I never saw it myself—and too close to him and it’s another matter…) If nothing else, I suppose this effort pretty much exemplifies the sort of thing I like in verse, e.g. not rhyming is fine (but ending on one is still kind of nice), strict-ish use of regular metre—I do like me some iambic pentameter—but not completely unyielding and unvarying ba-DUM ba-DUM etc. My body of work is not large (I don’t have a lot of ideas for writing), but this is one of the better examples of it.

It’s grim out east

A couple of shots I got of the thunderstorm moving through the area, first one from the front of the house and second from out the back. Given how frankly kind of shit my phone camera is, I’m actually quite impressed by how these came out (no photoshopping, cos my ancestral copy of PS6 won’t actually run on this Windows 11 machine so all I could do was scale the originals down a bit in IrfanView). Think I got these at a good time (about 20 minutes ago), cos it’s already looking a lot less threatening out there now compared to what it did in these pictures.

The Enmore Road Putsch?

So I spent my Saturday night at Enmore, and while there I was kind of taken aback by the sight of this bottlo sign a few doors down from the bar I was at… On closer inspection, I found it’s for an IPA called Philter, but when I first saw it—from the same angle I took the picture from—the “now open” sign was obscuring the P like it does in the photo. Consequently I initially read the text on the banner as HITLER. You may understand why I was a bit stunned at first sight…