salford + trafford + that

Rumours and chapbooks. News turned to ballads and plays. Arden of Faversham. Newspapers and pamphlets. Poetry. Queen Mab with Shelley's footnotes. Piracy and copyright. Why copyright why not copywrite? Confuses me anyway. Document. Documentary. Appearance. From the anxieties of The Faerie Queene to Culloden. Verbatim theatre. Internet memes. Oh Hai!

No? Suit yourself. Large birds turn out to be small birds. Birds are dissected with amazing symmetry. Patches of jungle. Amphorae. Visual poetry or graphic text if there's a difference. Smears on water. Dead plants and living. Stark wood. Caterpillar. Industry. Hallucinatory detail. Black water. Ripples. Reds. Blues. Yellow. Plastic and brick. Plastic looks like it's being granulated by time and pressure. Brick pressed from the residue. Engineering.

The pigeon did look bigger than it was. Mid afternoon. Morning and early afternoon recording. Talked on the phone. The pigeon ignored it. Didn't drink from the water. Probably watching some people fishing further down under the new road bridge.

At first this looked like two birds. So never in the same shot. Wings. Or parts of wings only. A little spine.

Tail. And legs. Go on and click it. Go to the bigger image. You can see the feet more easily that way. This is why I like my digital camera. Like Holman Hunt it has no discrimination. Every colour every detail is given the same weight. No compositional sense either. Sometimes you get it right.

No discrimination. Hallucinatory. Manchester will double for New Guinea. If you ignore the traffic noise. And the roads. And buildings. And proximity to Salford. Oh forget it then. How about Japan? Maybe Totoro's sleeping somewhere among these trees. There's magic even in cities. Not the palliative bullshit alternative therapists want to sell you. Not the paranoid fantasies of racists, religious fundamentalists, and political ideologues. Not the invented paganisms of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Wicca? Please. Your own magic. Your ability to transform your world. Mentally. Physically. Perhaps both. Isn't it nicer to tread light?

I had a look from a few angles. This one - unless I've confused it with another - was accomplished standing on the outside of the rail just over the water. No I've confused it with another. Nothing dramatic to imagine here. Memory.

Photos can replace memory. Remove what you actually saw what you actually thought with... Well images. My first glimpse of this was the furry texture. A dead mammal. But what? Most likely a fox. Possibly a dog. Even a cat although it looked too large.

There are traces here of the bubbles that constantly break the surface. There's a sequence of photos shot trying to capture it happening. Only because downloading video's a pain. Especially when there are photos on the card at the same time. One of them turn up later. Another one doesn't but appears to show a bubble travelling.

This one. This time I was across the railings and over the water. The only way to get this and exclude both the growth at the canalside and the rusted shopping trolley. A reasonable enough cliché but not this time. Some darker some lighter.

A smiling face? A dick? Abstract text? A version of the Rusholme Wilmslow Road Curry Mile logo far from home? A tree marked for removal or pruning? Answers etcetera.

This may be one of the swans I previously fooled by recording sound. Maybe I should go back with a sketchpad and pencils. Then with a notebook. How long until the swan either starts ignoring me or drags me onto a sandbank for a good kicking?

Some bubbles and the reflected sky distorted.

Salford will double for Norway. Note: check if the tram noises might interfere. Again stood partway over the railings. Here because the gaps in the railings were too small to fit a camera through and to avoid photographing my toes. Black water. It looks like a cold day here. It wasn't. People fishing close by. Love United Hate Glazer graffiti behind.

Chain. Listening. Mordant Music Black Advance. Bob Dylan Goin' To Acapulco. Earth Omens and Portents II: Carrion Crow. The Smiths Rusholme Ruffians. H'm. Cheery.

Display may be to deter predators.

Sometimes you're surprised by people you didn't know were there. Walking downhill singing what you think at first is a fallen sheep is two people fucking. In the toilet at work extemporising a song about being buggered your departmental head is just outside washing his hands. Chatting away to yourself four people having a picnic on this patch of grass. As a child. And teenager. And into my twenties I used to pretend I was being interviewed. A useful way of working out ideas. Who doesn't talk to themselves?

Yellow. I needed a break from all that nature.

In some shots the oil shows up better. This is a better photo though. More Pre-Raphaelite indiscriminate fizz of detail. Even with so little detail. They were awful. Sentimental. At least fifty years out of date. Retrograde. But I have a fondness for Holman Hunt. They're dreadful paintings. Poorly composed. And yet there's a craziness. A personal iconography. An insistence. He knows exactly what he's on about. Judgemental moralising. Some artists do everything they can to sabotage their own abilities. Sometimes the work's just strong enough to overwhelm them. Sometimes - with Hunt, with Edmund Spenser - the artist's stronger but only just. And then the work gets really crazy. The Miracle of the Holy Fire. The Faerie Queene.

But full of fire and greedy hardiment,

The youthfull knight could not for ought be staide,

But forth vnto the darksome hole he went,

And looked in: his glistring armor made

A little glooming light, much like a shade,

By which he saw the vgly monster plaine,

Halfe like a serpent horribly displaide,

But th'other halfe did womans shape retaine,

Most lothsome, filthie, foule, and full of vile disdaine.

The I Booke of The Faerie Queene, Canto I, Stanza 14

Thanks for sharing Ed but you really shouldn't have bothered. Really.

Where was I? Who knows? Ooh look - geometric shapes. And rust.

In the first programme of his current series Off Kilter Jonathan Meades speaking about granite as a building material. Specifically as a building material in Aberdeen. Said something about limestone and sandstone by comparison turning the picturesque twee. Sometimes I think you could say the same about brick. Thankfully someone had the good sense to adorn this patch. Half a centimetre further back I would have fallen in the canal. One of those awful slow inevitable slides you can't actually escape. I like the colourful annotations for those who only speak tag.

Plastic. Foul smell. I photograph record the sound and film this fairly frequently. The grass had been cut. The channel into this emerges from an underground tunnel. There's a ditch behind. Someone cycled past without seeing me. A plane that looked from some angles like a person falling circled. I thought about having a piss. It was quite pressing but in the end I hung on till I got home.

Brick.

Salford and Trafford and that. And a bit of Manchester.