Life is hard, exhausting and long. We are pulled in every direction by friends, family, work, clubs, societies, facebook, blogs, personal time, public time, kids, grandparents, distant relatives, wants, needs, fears, dreams. It's easy to forget the people you pass by, it's so easy, even logical to save your energy and patience for those who really mean something to you, for those who can give you something in return. But Paris has taught me not to sucumb to this failed and heartless practice. It makes you mean, it hardens your skin, dims you smile and rots your soul. The world is a deep and dark place and your worries may pale in comparison to the people you choose to ignore. So whether it is a man desolute by the side of the road, a woman lugging a pushchair up the stairs, a shy figure at a party, show them tenderness, call, drop a dime, bother to ask, wait to listen. It's 30 seconds, 1 minute, fuck you're not signing a contract for eternal friendship, it is just brief moment of tenderness, a hand at a moment of helplessness in an otherwise depressing moment. Are you so busy? Are you so important? So why not give a shit and make someone's day? I dare you.

knowledge reflux. in search of originality.

i-know. i-get it. i-saw it. i-did it. i-ve been there. i-am like SO over that.

Is is still possible to stumble upon an original thought, creation, human being?
The problem with telecommunications, home film editing kits, is that the audience is the creator, they engage, reflect on what they see and reconstruct it in their own opinion. The distance between the audience and actor is no longer so great. Like the iconic Obama image and the question of rights and loyalties. Who deserved them? The photographer who took the original, fairly average photo, or the artist you transformed it into the art work that ended up plastered across every building, magazine and screen saver in the US.

As an author how much of what you write is really your own? J. K. Rowling was blunt about how she used key images and events from classic tales of witchcraft and witchery to write Harry Potter. In a small corner of Edinburgh, where she wrote it, near to the world's oldest Medical School, you can find a dog-eared student union with a greenhouse roof, fake palm trees and sticky floors that one sub-zero evening played host to the 'Cheeky Girls'. It's called 'Potter Row'. So however you look at it, we find ourselves 'inspired by'...or 'stealing' ideas from the worlds we live in.

So here's the next thought. Does something not become original the minute it is transformed in an original way? Does it not become new? Is transformation really creation? Is the world then not filled with constant 'newness' as ideas, pictures, paintings, plays, films, books are sucked in and spat out of the terminals of our machines that we create and replace with equal speed.

Or, and this is how I look at it, are we not just renovating? Are our works of art not just a symptom of a doped up Post-Modernist society sending out its tentacles of apathy into an unsuspecting world. And it's a painful apathy to bear. To realise you are the children of the 'technology renaissance' or 'i-generation'. yay. That, thanks to Google, life holds no mysteries, heck you don't even have to travel thanks to the pinpoint imagery of Google world and any tingling desire to explore the heavens for that matter. It's almost like someone, admittedly a very clever someone and a couple of others, have taken the fun out of life. We're all saying the world is shrinking but don't question the consequences of our interconnections. When the wonder, the exploration, the vastness, incomprehensibility of mankind, space and life becomes tangible all these qualities are instantly lost. Not that, for example, a black hole could never be fully comprehended, but if we name it, explain how it works, and define its purpose, what happens to matter to when it hits it, its evolution it suddenly becomes a lot less frightening. The notion of death on the other hand is something Google can't ever get its hands on so it remains one of the few things in life that still incites real sweating emotion out of us. For that matter is knowledge not just the product of fear, since the dawn of man a innate fear of the unknown?

I digress, so how do we respond to all this renovation in our mapped out lives? Well naturally by finding the hidden pleasures. Yes, those very little things that are personal and, we hope, untouchable. These, surely are for our eyes only? Happiness is 'love' right?

'Can you picture, can you picture this',... besotted husband (tall, dark, johnny depp like - rugged but not too rugged so as to be uncontrollable and unruly, but just enough to give the impression 'they don't give a damn' and are 'different'), kids (cute), country house (by sea, spain, english/french countryside, maybe somewhere more exotic but ultimately there is a lot of outdoors living/dining involved), lots of spontaneous sex and good food.

And then, if your unlucky, you open your eyes to find your hidden pleasures under a floodlight. They too are utterly unoriginal because they are a product of you, and you are a product of the society you live in. end.

So what does all this breed. First: boredom. Boredom with ourselves because we don't have a good idea, even our best ideas can't make the cut. In our guts we know we've seen it somewhere before. And if we haven't seen it before, we don't want to see it. Why? Because it's some desperate failure, an attempt at genius that went horribly wrong, worst still the guy who made it thinks its genius, something that at best can only keep our attention for 2 years, that is the life span of the latest music crave or society's accepted length of a love affair these days.

Second: apathy, and self-righteous apathy at that. You become the type of person who on your Facebook profile under 'religion' writes 'apathetic' or under interests 'anything but politics'. Because you are so utterly tired of the world by the age of 23, so bored of the concept that you could, if you had any inclination to (which you don't because your bored) theoretically piece it together in infinite detail through some bloody concoction of your families prejudiced opinions, personal vendettas, 2 week holidays, you tube, and the web. You are so damn self-righteous because 'you get it and they don't'. When someone tries to change things, when they give a damn, you mock them or ignore them. Why? Because you're so damn right they've 'got it wrong' even though you have the faintest clue of what is 'right'.

Third: Bitterness. Bitter at anyone who, despite all this, remains optimistic. Bitter at your inability to be original. And maybe, this is where self-destruction drops in like some anodynic bomb. Drugs, violence, heck terrorism rears up as people frantically search for a return to the past, back to their roots, finding a lucid child-like state of joy, or maybe even an idolised past full of pure originality, guarded by religion. Exposed to the reverberations of banal and pointless Western youths, the desperation and frenetic pulse of their actions is stark if only by its pure energy.

So I kick the dust in my lazy search for clean, crisp, real emotion, real originality that ultimately contains happiness. I've met a couple of honest people in the process, there's this guy...

la vie en rose

Morceaux des valeurs

Classical music on the metro
The metro line 2 as it passes Stalingrad and Jaures on a clear day.
La Defense at sunset
The giant bubble blowing man at Georges Pompidou
L'Hedonism Quotidien
How few adjectives there are, e.g. Ennuyeux = annoying, boring, dull,...wait I will think of more to prove my point!
The terrace view from a friend's appartment
Working less, living/talking more
France Inter in the morning
Cigarette butts and dog poo
Folk/eastern european music
Everyone's private book collections
Fanfare
Societal rules against doing anything alone
Warm baguettes
....

brixton decadence

Brixton Decadence, originally uploaded by JDpicKs.

a weekend in London and I ended up at Brixton Academy for a fete of feminity starring my little bro Roy and his installation 'Up Miss Ella Vator'.