DAY OF THE DEAD AGAIN

Forgetting how long it takes to compose a handwritten letter, I’ve had an unexpected day off work today as morning has turned into early evening! Add the fact that the fingers of my right hand feel like they’ve suffered being crushed by stampeding, skating nuns (that is if you can stampede and skate at the same time – well, who was it painted that great painting of Skating Nuns – they certainly looked as terrifying as stampeding bulls anyway), then I’m glad the pen has more or less been scripted off to the great writing pad in the sky!

It’s also yet another one of those public holidays here tomorrow when the workforce gets yet another one of those many religious days off work to pay respect to their departed on ‘The Day of the Dead’, followed on Thursday by ‘All Saints Day’, or is it the other way round?

Anyway, you may remember my failed attempts last year, when I was strongly prompted to take a shufti down at a cemetery, (any cemetery I was told), to take in the breathtaking sight, when at dusk and well into the night, every living soul gathers on mass at every necropolis in Poland, their candles ablaze in enough numbers to be seen from outer-space and God alike.

My mistake last year unfortunately was to toddle off on my own when I really didn’t know my way around the place, deciding to walk, not to the famous easy to find and huge Zydowski and Powazkowski cemeteries to the north of Warsaw, but an equally large one on the map to the south of the city which appeared to be just a wee bit closer – perhaps a three quarter hour walk..? After an hour and a half I was totally lost in the pitch black of course, and perhaps it was just as well that I never found the place as I later found out I was heading for the cemetery dedicated to Soviet Soldiers – Traditionally just about barren, save for the odd bear or two rummaging around preparing for hibernation, at this time of year.Feeling a bit in hibernation mode myself today, I guess I’ll give it a miss this year in favour of catching up on a lost days work!

EXPLORER OR JOURNEYMAN

For someone with the childhood nickname of ‘Pyjamas’ you can imagine that I didn’t ever seriously want to leave my bedroom as a youngster - preferring instead to dream away a life of adventure securely pressed under the heavy-weight bedcovers which, before Britain saw sense in adopting the duvet from Scandinavia, seemed the only sensible option!

With the advent of lightweight bedding, and what I thought of as the odd easy move or two, it came as a bit of a surprise this morning then to realize that after totting-up all the places I can remember living, the grand total added up to over twenty addresses since the day I finally kicked off those restrictive blankets and night clothes alike – these estimates - this very morning I might add - from the bed of a great guy I’ve met only once before when I first fell in love with Dominika way back in Cambridge all those years ago - Grzegorz, who at extremely short notice has been kind enough to rent his empty flat to me for the next four months or so while he is away doing his own form of journeying and I find something just a wee bit more ‘permanent’ up here in ‘dyed-in-the-wool’ Białystok.

So, it’s do widzenia to Warszawa and the Alley of Liberation then, and dzień dobry to suitcase living for a while again. It’s all of course in the grand design, but, at the age where most I know of a similar age are settled at home either planning the best futures possible for their little’nes, or watching their grown-up bank balances reach golden proportions in their maturity, then I do wonder when, if ever, the plan will come together?

Or, is this where it’s at for me? Explorer am I now?

Right now, while I sit with a cup of tea cupped to my lips staring out of the window at a very unfamiliar scene, it feels more like Journeyman – for although



you’d think I’d be used to all the upheaval after so many moves, then in most ways I am, but the initial wrench each and every time always knocks the stuffing out of me and drops the emotions into the pot to stew for a bit! Thing is though, I love moving on, and up until the time you perhaps truly come across that special place on the planets surface which matches those secure coordinates you find within and with friends and the people you love, then perhaps there’s no need to fret – learn to accept who and what you are and stop worrying about how well the rest of the world’s doing!

Leaving Warsaw however is of course wrought with a certain amount of sadness. A city which for me resembles most closely ‘the place’ of my youth, it has come to represent the closest thing to-date to a place, (since a predominantly great time growing up in Sunderland all those years ago), which I could just about think of as home!

But, sadly bidding farewell to some of the most amazing people and characters I’ve had the pleasure to meet aside, together with leaving behind the streets and places I grew to love, then the place just wasn’t home, and for all the genuinely wonderful memories left me, with just the occasional comings and goings of friends etc., it never could have been; and it gradually became apparent that it lacked some fundamental aspects – like a Greggs for Stotties and Pies to gobble on together with the prospect of enough supplementary work to buy the alternative - Add to this the lack of a truly current and vibrant art scene, then..?

Now I’m not sure Białystok will prove to be any more pulsating in this respect, and I know Pies and Stotties are forever to be placed on the back-burner, but the move here is a relatively temporary solution, with Białystok being much less expensive to survive in than Warsaw, and with ‘conversation work’ to supplement the painting hopefully being easier to find as and when, it should prove a much better platform from which to launch this ‘resurgent’ career of mine..!

WORTH A LOOK

ART RESTORATION:

A Chemical Perspective – A Replacement Prospect…

Charles Saatchi, who in recent years has been selling off works by the Young British Artists that he collected so avidly in the 90s, in selling on Damien Hirst’s ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’ two years ago to the billionaire Steven A. Cohen, has opened a window for Hirst to restore or rather, replace what remains of the decaying Tiger Shark he chucked, inadequately-preserved, in a tank of formaldehyde back in 1991.

By the time Mr. Cohen had forked out $8 million for the thing, desperate attempts by the Saatchi Gallery to preserve the work had left little but the skin of the fish stretched over a fibre-glass frame… That is.., until now; for it seems the artist has had a replacement shark waiting in cold storage for the day he could get his hands on his most famous piece of work again..!

When he learned of Mr. Cohen’s plans to buy the 22-ton work, he volunteered to replace the shark, adding that he frequently works on things after a collector has them. The artist said. “I recently called a collector who owns a fly painting because I didn’t like the way it looked, so I changed it slightly.’’

This raises a rather interesting question regarding ‘The Physical Impossibility…’ however, as to whether the ‘restored’ piece, as a ‘work of art’, is a copy or not..? And, what are they going to do with the ‘original’? Kind of makes a nonsense out of the idea of art works as icons etc! And, let’s hope Mr. Hirst gets it right this time, for I’m sure he doesn’t have any more sitting in the freezer, and once he’s popped his clogs - what then..?

Swimming With Famous Dead Sharks - Related Story here - The New York Times

HOUSE FLIES AND UNFINISHED BUSINESS

When you start to believe that the House Fly which has been bugging you for the last three or four days by fondling your wrist, your bare ankle, the nape of your neck, does so because it loves you; it’s time to take stock!


I might add, I don’t like killing anything, but enough was enough, and after running around after the brazen hussy like a blue arsed fly, I managed to whack the annoying little bugger with the latest copy of ‘Fakt’ yesterday afternoon. Luckily for my impending state of guilt, I happened to simply stun the thing and chucked it as far as I could over and away from the balcony! Today however, I swear the shameless creature cocking its head from left to right and staring at me with its huge cow eyes from the laptop’s keyboard was one in the same beast. It died!

As has any foreseeable excursions in the realms of urban landscape (recent paintings of which can be found here), with a return to the figure being inevitable… It’s probably the home I crave – my private, exclusive way of expressing anything which may be atypical.

‘Everyone is born into the world to do something unique and distinctive and if they don’t do it, it will never be done’ so says Benjamin E. Mays, and if Lin Yutan is to be believed, ‘If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live’, well I'm not sure if I’ve managed anything unique just yet in my forty-six times around the sun, having achieved the latter in a state of perfect uselessness on many a worthless afternoon than I dare to remember, then I’m not sure if I’ll ever achieve the aforementioned! But hey, we’ll keep on going and trying even if those wonderful life-filled afternoons add up to little more than me killing myself with Cigarettes, Booze and leaving little time to complete the project! Still, to know how to live beats letting nature take its own course, with its preference for rotting a person away slowly – surely! And anyway, life’s too short to piss about trying to prolong it..! Unfinished it all may well be, but, well, death has a knack of finishing it all off anyway! For now…