Just don't expect any sequituring around here. OK? It's time for that difficult second album.
A shopping trip to the-next-town-over unexpectedly became a highlight of the week. This would have been a mundane exercise in the Before Times, but an 18-month absence truly can make the heart grow fonder (or, if not fonder, at least more benevolent). Novelty and no great time pressure turned the trip into an artist's date. (The Artist's Way was a book that kept pinging itself onto my radar in Lockdown One, so I finally caved and bought it. I think it's brilliantly insightful – so many *yes!* moments in the first chapter – but six months later I've only managed to get up to Chapter Four. There is definitely a blog post to be written about resistance. Eventually.)
After-effects of lockdown have been occasionally surprising. To get genuinely excited about *going to a different supermarket* has been a cause for reflection. Are we really so dependent on the new? Is the infinite variety that can be experienced just by looking at the sky, or paying attention to the tree on your street corner not enough? But it seems that simply being somewhere novel, or at least unfamiliar, is a sensory stimulation that was too easy to take for granted. How do we maintain this heightened awareness without resorting to self-isolation, monastic retreats, or paradoxically expensive off-grid holidays? There's something to be learnt from artists like Jacqui Kenny who is perhaps the embodiment of 'do what you can with what you have'. Being agoraphobic has kept her physical world limited, but her photographer's eye seeks out the expansive and the engaging in an online existence. Her collection of images from Google Street View show that fascination can be found by just paying attention to what might easily be overlooked.
In a similar vein, I also enjoy Miranda Keeling's observations of everyday life. Overheard conversations and tiny vignettes are plucked out and turned around in the light to reveal small delights.
In the-next-town-over, a grey man in grey clothes carries two bright orange Sainsburys bags-for-life, like a forlorn landing signal officer missing his aircraft carrier.
Listen of the week: Gruff Rhys Loan Your Loneliness – hook-heavy, hard-to-place loveliness.
Wix gripe of the week: is there a way of typing an em-dash without cut-and-pasting in from Word? I want to be too lazy to do that, but it *really* sets my teeth on edge to see.
Tot straks!
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