Mist

Why I love the Midlands...

"When a thing becomes it's most extreme, the seeds of its opposite are
planted" - Sabina Murray.

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Boxing day

Boxing Day Beers at Günther's Sausages. :-)

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Cars

Years ago, when I lived out West, Johannesburg central was the 'big-night-out'. Years ago,the roadhouse was the pit-stop. There was two iconic roadhouses on the Krugersdorp/Joburg Ontdekkers night drive, Wagonwheels in Horizon and the Americano on the Delaray/Newlands border. Both (as most roadhouses are) gone now, though the premises (and signage) of the Americano still exists - its now a car dealer, and perhaps, in memory of its previous status, it stocks classic cars.
I must apologise, It occurred to me to pack my camera but thought 'Naaah, I'm on my way to collect my bike, ...' so I've only cellie pics. I must make take another trip there with a proper camera, methinks!



Studebaker Hawk - droolworthy indeed!





















A bloody great big black Ford:







Two more Fords- Fairlaine 500s - niiiiice

















A gem of a '39 Chevy, rodded in authentic mat black stealth-style, I want this one!






















A beautiful '68 Jaguar, straight out of some classic British copper tv series...




Out in the yard were a few 'need-a-little-work' models:



I love old cars, I don't think there's much on the road these days that matches the styling, anything post '75 is some generic computer streamlined carbon copy of something else...

Pink drinks

Pink drinks - Xai-Xai - obscure covers slurred. Somewhere, one of
those revolving emergency lights have kicked in - and nobody notices .
. .

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The Justice League

I did this for a wee challenge on the Whitechapel site




The idea was to come up with a movie poster of the Justice League designed by Malcom McLaren...

The Weakly Natter

Gardening:Mowed the lawn for the third time this summer.Not bad, considering that by September it looked like one of those landscape pics from the Mars Rover. Started on the bit I hope to turn into a wee veggy patch - a section not utilised by the puppy training classes given by the missus. Seedlings in, at this stage a colourful variety of chard, a gemsquash, some mustard greens and a few marigold.

The green thing there is the 'pet loo', I bought it from the 'Saints' charity stall, and is reputed to turn all your dog shyte into compost, judging by the seedlings I put around it initially, its working, so I've started the patch from that point...

At the start of spring I stared an (experimental) container planting system in the back yard, sort of a semi-hydroponic thing. It's no great shakes. I think I have the soil too rich at this point or something, the veggies are growing, but sloooowly, at this stage I expected masses of product and a market garden stall on the pavement - perhaps I'm just impatient and should be happy with the half dozen beans I've got from it. Of course,the fact that a couple of the dogs, particularly Faolin the Border Collie, has taken a liking to squash leaves hasn't helped at all.












I have been practising a spot of guerrilla gardening in my own garden by planting vegetable odds and sods in odd areas, this has proved more successful than the bloody carefully tended parts - go figure!





I'm at present well into working on Marc Latilla's graphic novel, about 9 pages in, 6 inked, 5 lettered the rest still in various stages of completion. Here's page one:







Stuff that's come into my dimension this week: Northlanders No.5, the conclusion of the 'Metal' storyline. I've been following Brian Wood's stuff since I picked up a trade of DMZ, a series I thoroughly recommend. Northlanders is based in Viking Lore and is equally as unputdownable as DMZ.
Zola Jesus' latest release, Stridulum 2, a great album indeed.
The Scott Walker documentary '30th Century Man', I haven't watched it yet, its on the menu for this evening. I've been a fan of Scott Walker's music for years, from his early stuff with the Walker Brothers to what he's doing these days - the utterly fantastic 'The Drift', nothing like his early stuff at all but the same incredible voice.

Check out the video for Jesse by Scott Walker

Ghosts

The logical side of me doesn't believe in ghosts, I keep telling myself that. However, I was 'haunted' as a kid growing up in London...



I grew up in a classic old London terrace in Kennington Road, Lambeth, SE 11, there it is today, above, courtesy Google Maps. It was an old place (typically) and I'd always been told it went up in the 1700's, so was creaky, drafty but solid as a rock. I confirmed the dates just this morning, on a whim, the net's become a wonderful place for this. Built in 1790, on the edge of an 8 acre field called White Hart Field, previously known as Coney Warren. The terrace was then named Chester Place, a name that fell out of use in the late 1800's. Research has shown me that our place,261, was at that time number 16 and the next door neighbors were folk like one 'Jonathan Duncan, the younger, a currency reformer, son of a governor of Bombay' and '(Sir) Thomas Edlyne Tomlins, legal writer. He was called to the bar in 1783, and was for some years editor of the St. James's Chronicle. He held the post of parliamentary counsel to the chancellor of the exchequer for Ireland. He was knighted in 1814. He published several legal works, including Statutes at Large, 41 to 49, George III'



An odd link I found was this one:and I wonder if it is in any way linked to one of my favourite authors, Micheal Moorcock in any way. Powyes (here a place, a vilage in Wales) is a character in the Jerry Cornelius chronicles, as is the 'Cure for Cancer'- the title of the first book in the series...Dr Powell, mentioned in the article, lived at (then) number 30...

I used to have nightmares that saw me paralysed on my bed, gaze riveted at a space on the wall over my bed. I'd wake up at night and a voice would be demanding me to roll over and look at the wall, at a face that appeared on the wall, it looked a lot like this picture...






Whether I had seen a picture of this apparition in a book or something I cannot remember, i was around 5 or 6, I used to devour books and had a grand old set of encyclopedias that engrossed me, so perhaps I saw it there. The wind used to moan down the chimney and perhaps that was the voice. My mother says that she would come in and find me pale, wide-eyed, stiff as a board and transfixed at the spot on the wall, taking no cognisance of her presence. This carried on until I was about 8 or so, until one night I refused to roll over, a couple of nights of that and it took the hint...

One day the old lady next door died, she was ancient and wheel-chair bound.I'd never met her as she was always inside and I was somehow scared of her as she peered through the lace curtains at us. For three nights after her death her silhouette appeared on my bedroom door, lit up by the street light over in Denny Way... oh yes it did, on her wheelchair at that!



My mother's sensitive to these things, its her 'witchy' side (mwahahahaha) and she swears she felt two 'presences' in the house, one evil and malevolent but this was kept in check by a stronger 'good' force. If we were alone in the house, at night, dad was out working or away, the sound of footsteps would be heard walking up from the ground floor, up the stairwell and past up to the attic, where our bedrooms were. Of course there was no-one there, but a sense of well-being and calm would envelop us - this was the good one, coming up the stairs to look after us...

I was terrified of the basement in that house, I had nightmares whereby I was going through the basement to the backyard and I'd get grabbed, my feet churning through tar to get away. The basement was used for, predictably junk and had the coal cellars. Our geyser was coal fired until I was about 8 I think, so coal was an all year round necessity. One door in the basement led down further, I have no idea what was down here as at some stage someone had filled this space with coal, so the stairs disappeared in solid sooty blackness.I remember sitting down there,on the pile of coal - I must've gotten over the fear then, or was challenging it, with a only a box of matches for light. What was down there, why was there a stairwell leading down, where did it go? What existed on Coney Warren before Chester Place was built? I'd love to find out now.

Stamp collections!

Did that get yer attention?

Where's yer anorak?

No picture today, mere verbiage..

Tonight I attended the opening of a stamp collection!

http://www.joburg.org.za/culture/calendar/view/3708/54

It was totally unintentional, the last time I saw stamps was when some relative of elderly female persuasion gave me an 'album' and a 'starter pack' of stamps when I was knee-high to the letter box, but the missus works at the museum and had a hand in putting a few things together for this and I had to pick her up at work, sooooo...

However, this JH Curle collection got me thinking, and got me despondent on local 'culture' and modern 'lifestyle' all over again... Here is a collection of stuff, totally bloody unique, a collection of stamps from the beginnings of the Transvaal Republic, things I wouldn't look twice at, but the one fella who worked to put this together introduced it, was damnably passionate about it. Some fella came all the way from the U.K. to say a bit - to all of 15 folk that was there. 15....most of them connected to the museum in some way, how may folk would attend such an exhibition in the first world?

I was more interested in the occasional stuff around the stamps..photos, a post stone, a map of the Transvaal from 1877...detailed down the the tiniest hill, Johannesburg wasn't on it! The detailed map of Pretoria involved, perhaps 7X 9 blocks.... These stamps connected people before Johannesburg was even a thought. it was farms and sparkling tumbling streams...

In the introduction, the chap told how, in 'those' days, sending a letter involved a huge amount of effort. Finding out the postage, where and when and how..crikey, today we send an e-mail and think nothing of it...nothing! People went the extra mile to stay in touch, keep informed and inform others, something we take so much for granted now.I think I read gawdknows how many news stories, articles, blogs and numerous blather on Facebook and Twitter today, something that would have involved weeks and months back then. The chap who collected these stamps-JH Curle, would take a round trip of near two months to sail SA/ England to get one stamp.....

I think the exhibition could've had a lot more in it, could've had better lighting, more stuff related to the main subject (its all there, sealed away in storerooms), a better setting than some partitioned off back area of the museum. I'm damnably sure a professional collector would cringe at the presentation of, what are purportedly very rare items, stuck up on boards underneath tacky plastic sheets. But that's all we can do, in Africa's biggest city, in its major museum - no budget, one or two curators yet sitting on a wealth of artifacts and documents that no-one will ever see..or really wants to.....

I don't know, stuff like this gets me thinking. It puts where we are now in such sharp perspective, we take it for granted and we abuse it in so many ways.

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Pint o' the day - again!

I had forgotten about Drayman's, a micro-brewer based in Pretoria
(www.draymans.com). They do a nice range, Goblin's Bitter, a very
passable India Pale Ale, a weisbier and a draught. Unfortunately it's
bottled in plastic but caught fresh enough the plastic doesn't come
through.
A bit hard to find, I've found only two bottlestores, so far, Joburg
side, that stock the range.

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And today's pint is...

Found a batch of these and others that need sampling down Beyers Naude
on Saturday. I thought best to keep this for the Sunday sun downer -
cheers, bombs /chocks away!

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Jacaranda2

Linden 17 10 10

Can't beat this time of year for seeing Johannesburg in all its purple splendor.... to think that the jacaranda is now listed as an 'invasive' species, not to be planted anywhere, preferably destroyed ...phegh bloody 'eco-minded' bureaucrats!

Jacaranda time

Melville, 15/10/2010........

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Thai-bo

Bloody breath-stealer, perched on chest and purring like a gravel
crusher on speed...
Thai-bo, menace cat!

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New work..

A while back Marc Latilla asked me if I would be keen on collabating on a graphic novel. More recently we've got our act together and I'm several pages into it already..here's an example or two

The Sunday Pint

Post roofwork, post housework, post lawnwork, post Interpol appreciation, the well earned pint...

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Sprung

As it has, yes, willows trees in full spring regalia, south of
Johannesburg just off Kliprivier Drive. Bottomless coffee, Mug n Bean,
bakkie full of galvanised buckets and trays on my way for a company
sponsored shopping spree for antique props for one of the airport
stores that we are 'redoing'...

Hell, I s'pose I should've posted this on my display blog I've kicked
into play - Window Punk...

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I Am The One

I've had enough of living
I've had enough of dying
Why should I care
Can you see the real me
Love reign o'er me
Can you see the real me???

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Coffee break

So, here I sit, atthe airport, again...
Career-wise busted back to where I was 10 years ago, a sobering thought indeed, its a bugger being good at what one does,eh! Well, retail hasn't done well at all the last couple of years...

Anyway, plenty of time for reflection and as one of those is that I gave up the notion of 'career' years ago (about the time of the first retrenchment) I aint too badly off and as long as I can wield a pencil I'm one up already.

Bring it on...!

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Web site

So, I've been told that additional web exposure will aid me in what (I feel) I do best - that's doodle stuff for folk (for a small fee...)
Consequently I have a 'web-page' up on Yola.
I'll progressively bung stuff on there as I rediscover it in files either digital or on the old fashioned paper-made-from-minced-trees.

A musical interlude

One of my weekly haunts is Bountyhunters charity shop in Melville, a place to indulge in any retail therapy I need and as that therapy usually involves music, the sight of a new box o' vinyl always gets the pulse racing.

This week was a box of stuff, that in the past, I would've cast aside, but, as I seem to find myself on a journey (back) through a lot of folk and folk-rock, discs full of traditional Scottish and Irish ballads, albeit by the sort of artist I'd generally avoid like the plague it seemed worthwhile to invest in a few - at a buck apiece, what the hell.

So, I grabbed a couple o' items by the like o' th' Alexander Brothers (och aye, I didn't take 'em all!!), The Second Festival of Welsh Mixed Voices (I like a good choir) and others, also some British Music Hall stuff including some George Formby. All the discs were in almost new condition, obviously stashed since gawd knows when.

Anyway, the gem of the lot is a disc by Jean Redpath, "Laddie Lie Near Me", an absolute spine chilling voice on songs either solo or with acoustic guitar. Jean is the kind of artist that I'll now hunt down and find more of (and there seems to be a bit aboot). I like good passionate female vocals be it Diamanda Galas, Catherine Ribiero or Siouxie Sioux.



A wee choon onna Youtube

So, the afternoon went from Jean Redpath through the likes of Maddy Prior and June Tabor on their 'Silly Sisters' album (had it for years, since my first wave of folk appreciation way back when)- its all in the voices, see, that clear high soprano, does it for me every time.


And then on to Rose Kemp 's "Unholy Majesty" that I picked up earlier this year and fell totally in love with, especially when I discovered that Rose is the daughter of Maddy Prior and Rick Kemp of Steeleye Span fame. Anyway, got hold of Rose's first album 'Full of Hurricanes' this morning and I'm certainly determined to get hold of Maddy Prior's 'Bib & Tuck' which is an acapella rendition of traditional folk featuring amongst others, her daughter, Rose.



Rose Kemp in full tilt -->

The President Street Pigeon Posse

I notice I didn't 'blog' this but posted it elsewhere.
I think its worthy of blogation, so:

Early morning, eastern end of President street, you look up, the buildings have a fuzzy edge, they seethe, they coo, careful, you’re in pigeon country.

Suddenly, on cue the walls erupt as thousands of bodies hurl themselves down into President Street. Maybe someone opened a window, rattled a seed bag, murdered their spouse...The mass flicks south on Mooi Street, rising as it turns east into Market, big, small, young, old, black, grey and brown struggling to keep up. Midway down the block, a break in the decayed wall of what used to be architecture, up over through the gap, transverse the block and down again into President. Depending on the weather, the feathered tide goes the other way around. I think of the canyon race in one of those newer Star Wars movies, sometimes on the tarmac is found a flattened pile of blood and feathers, one wing rising defiantly.

Occasionally, whilst on my way to work, my ride will bisect this surge, wingtips flicking past my helmet, I have to resist the urge to raise my arms and leap off my saddle to join the fray. I can do anything after that....

Goodnight

Sundowners on the deck at Dros, Campus Square, Auckland Park, Johannesburg, during this past week.

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warmth

Yes, so, something that we started, or conjoined, or something a few weeks ago and then got lost in the static.

The theme - warmth - the duvet pic is by Hilla , the cat ( starring Flotsam!!!) is by me,,,

Don't you feel warmer already?

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Day in the life of a window dresser

Or, as I am told these days, a 'visual merchandiser', window dresser being an archaic term. Well I suppose as we do everything from (basic, these days) decor to unpacking stock on to the sheves. Ah, those heady days of studios and backdrops, props and pins, the correct way to fold a shirt or pad a shoulder, or even focusing a spotlight just so.

Anyway, the picture is what I'm looking at at the mo', I'm waiting for the stock to arrive, its here, but at the way back of a stockroom underneath a months worth of deliveries.

In my codienne haze (I fell off the garage roof last Sunday,fortunately nothing but bad sprains and bruises, but thats enough, thankyou) trying to put together a workable display of objects ranging from crockery and hand turned pottery thru jewellery items and carved wooden fish...

This has, of course, all been dropped on us at the last moment.

I have constructed some 'stands' from some pillaged glass shelving on which to array the stuff, this is my inbuilt McGuyver streak coming to the fore, something that is essential in this line of work.

I'll post an after pic if the whole thing stays together...

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Wallah!

Monday and all that.

So yesterday I spent a good part of the morning up on the garage roof, stripping off metal strip tiling that has, over time, slipped. This has caused the wooden battens underneath to rot, causing the tiles to slip furthur..etc,etc. Nowt wrong with the original corrugated roof underneath other than nail holes and suspect timbering from the leaks let in by the strip tiles above... Such are the trails of buying a big old fixer-upper. The holes can wait till next week, my back started protesting so the idea of crawling around the roof patching them dulled somewhat, we get no rain this time of year anyway (normally!). The pic, why the sun streaming through the holes...

Of course, a morning up on the roof, shirt off, cool winter breeze, sees me feeling more than a little rough this morning...*sniffle*

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Joburg

Busy bloody week , all the World Cup's fault. Heading home from the airport every night, I've been blessed with some amazing sunsets and forced to pull off the highway in order to capture some small part of them. We have pretty spectacular sunsets, the winter tending to add to the palette with a hefty dose of smoke from veld-fire, factory and hearth.....

After the intense chill of last week, it's a lot warmer (well, -1 as opposed to -10) so I'm back on the bike - far easier to stop n click...

Friday!

At last, 'tis been a long week, not helped by bouts of insomnia. Anyway, all made better by a glorious Highveld winter morning, fresh and clear, the blue sky going on forever and ever - nicely contrasted by the yellow brick of the telephone exchange building opposite our house. Took some magnificent shots of the setting sun during the week, these are on my real camera ( as opposed to the cellie one used here) so I'll post those over the weekend.

Happy Friday!

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