Orbiting

To answer the few of you who emailed to enquire where I've disappeared to, my involvement with blogs over the past 2 months has mainly consisted of reading other peoples. My own lies untended and with a hefty stack of half written posts in my draft folder.

Never one to understand doing something for the sake of doing it, I've realised/accepted the reoccurring patterns between my blogging and my creative process in the 'real' world. It can't be forced. Ideas spring forth, i capture them, the work is completed but only when my heart is in it.

Life has been chaotic and at times confusing over the past few months. These changes has stirred things up, brought amazing people into my life and reawakened parts of me which have lain dormant for many years. As a result I've taken a few steps back from other areas and will be resuming shortly.

For now I'm taking pleasure in the simple things:

Listening to Crass at top volume

Devouring two new books: 'Just Kids' by Patti Smith and 'Voudon Gnosis' by David Beth.

Giving Swain Corvus a head scratch whilst watching 'The Walking Dead'.

The smell wafting from my kitchen with lemon roasted chicken in the oven.

Listening to WGH rhapsodize about cricket over a few drinks.

Sending positive thoughts after hearing bad news about an old flame and hoping that he gets the help he so badly needs.

Gush

"The French poet, Rimbaud, predicted that the next great crop of writers would be women. He was the first guy who ever made a big women's liberation statement, saying that when women release themselves from the long servitude of men they're really gonna gush. New rhythms, new poetries, new horrors, new beauties. And I believe in that completely.

But hung-up women can't produce anything but mediocre art, and there ain't no room for mediocre art."

Patti Smith

Image: Robert Mapplethorpe

Bolt

"I haven't fucked much with the past, but I've fucked plenty with the future. Over the skin of silk are scars from the splinters of stations and walls I've caressed. A stage is like each bolt of wood, like a log of Helen, is my pleasure. I would measure the success of a night by the way by the way by the amount of piss and seed I could exude over the columns that nestled the P.A. Some nights I'd surprise everybody by skipping off with a skirt of green net sewed over with flat metallic circles which dazzled and flashed. The lights were violet and white. I had an ornamental veil, but I couldn't bear to use it.

When my hair was cropped, I craved covering, but now my hair itself is a veil, and the scalp inside is a scalp of a crazy and sleepy Comanche lies beneath this netting of the skin. I wake up. I am lying peacefully I am lying peacefully and my knees are open to the sun. I desire him, and he is absolutely ready to seize me. In heart I am a Moslem; in heart I am an American; in heart I am Moslem, in heart I'm an American artist, and I have no guilt. I seek pleasure. I seek the nerves under your skin. The narrow archway; the layers; the scroll of ancient lettuce. We worship the flaw, the belly, the belly, the mole on the belly of an exquisite whore. He spared the child and spoiled the rod. I have not sold myself to God. "

' Babelogue' by Patti Smith

Image by Robert Mapplethorpe