ITS RAINING MENSKIS...HALLELUJAH

The streets of Russia seemed to be perversely awash with fresh meat in uniform. Sailor boys a dime a dozen sauntered around the waterfront streets of Petersburg while surly-looking army types paraded manfully across Red Square. Even Police Academy boys roamed the streets in packs sporting fetching double-denim Canadian Tuxedoes* and saucy baseball caps. Eminating that sexy yet mildly intimidating whiff of authority, these young bucks ruled the streets knowing they come from a country where the men are real men and the women are glad about it. Judging by the numerous, sweet and feverish public displays of affection we witnessed from the young men toward their birds...maybe thats not a bad thing.

* Canadian Tuxedo (c) Mal Saymontry 2008...revolting double demin ensemble often sported by redneck North Americans

ST. BASIL'S CATHEDRAL MOSCOW...THE MONEY SHOT

Summer holiday this year starred the intriguing and often outright bizarre land of Russia. Moscow's Red Square was semi-closed on account of intense preparations for some grandiose Muscovite celebration (much to my travelling companion's ire)...resulting in our immediate retirement to the closest bar to sink a number of commiserating vodkas. Harsh. Very harsh indeed.

Ironically enough, Red Square's St. Basil's Cathedral was rather aesthetically unappealing - all liver reds, lime greens and blues, the building's clashing exterior textures and shapes leaving your humble correspondent with nothing short of a bastard behind the eyes. However, the Russkies certainly let rip with the razzamattazz after dark via a series of vibrant, stunning light projections...utterly transforming the cathedral into the impressive beauty you see below. The locals sucked it up and poured it out, beaming faces basking in the evening glow...when they weren't directing the famous Moscovite Inscrutable Stare* toward the only two Filthy Gaijin* in (what seemed like) the entire city...

* Muscovite Inscrutable Stare (c) JA 2011 - the glowering, thunderous glare directed towards foreigners, usually by heavy set, middle-aged women...aka..."cronks".
* Filthy Gaijin - from the Japanese, literally an 'outside person' or foreigner.

FIRE ON BABYLON

Amazed to hear along the local grapevine today that my little home village of Leura has hit the headlines on account of some twisted firestarter going apeshit down in the bush, deliberately starting fires with 'incendary devices' (whatever they are). Ok its no London riots, but two of the eight fires started were uncomfortably close to the Robert Smiths Tears childhood compound and let me tell you the bush is terrifying enough as a kid - harbouring axe murderers, paedophiles, flashers and other itinerant bogeymen - let alone deranged firebugs stalking the forest canopies armed with gasoline and matches.

Having been distracted these last few weeks poncing through elegant English country estates and the wild badlands of rural Russia, I was reminded today of just how brutal the Australian landscape can be. Australia is renowned at the best of times for being an unforgiving land of barbarity due to extreme weather conditions. If entire rural towns aren't disappearing up in smoke during the devilishly hot summers (Victoria, 2009) then its the capital cities finding themselves submerged under putrid flood waters (Brisbane, 2011).

In 1957, large parts of Leura were destroyed after a bushfire swept up through the surrounding valley engulfing the modest row of village shops in less than an hour. Vintage pics below from Naomi Bulger's blog. Luckily the village has escaped the grapes of wrath of wild bushfires since then, however each summer feels like a lottery when a collective sigh of relief is felt when your number hasn't come up for another year.

The local fire brigades are a vital part of the Blue Mountains community and as the threat of bushfire destruction re-emerges each summer, controlled burning performed by (often volunteer) fire-fighters minimises the risk. The distinctive aroma of bushfires are an evocative memory of many a bogan Aussie childhood as well as the 'get down low, go go go!' government school fire advice dished out to doe-eyed young primary schoolers back in the 80s. Fire kills, peeps. Don't be a dick'ead with matches!! 

Thanks to Nick Moir, smh, Sky News and flickr for all other images. 

MARTYNA ZOLTASZEK'S FRIDA KAHLO

At my workstation last week, Inspector Google and I came across this beautiful painting above of Frida Kahlo. On a whim I decided to email artist and illustrator Martyna Zoltaszek to sniff out the possibility of a sale. After some (thankfully) not-very-heavy-duty negotiating we agreed on a price and I visited Martyna tonight at Hackney's Absorb Art studios off the Kingsland Road to collect the work.

Martyna (below) welcomed me at the door like an old friend and immediately began entertaining me with funny stories like her escape from conventional marriage in her Polish hometown of Wroclaw. Other vignettes of her interesting last decade included a scholarship to study art in the US, a bohemian few months spent painting in Australia with a minted boyfriend and his artist mother and her tale of woe when a London gallery went bust without paying her a pound. The evil shysters. 

   

Martyna's delicate, naive-influenced paintings feature wild colourful tigers, roaring Communist bears and other animal motifs such as the minimalist, almost monochrome, stark-eyed canine pictured above. The Frida painting was the first portrait Martyna had completed and the counter offers she received over the weekend to buy the piece at the Absorb Arts open studios are a testament to her very significant talent. 

Ms Zoltazsek's little studio space in east London seemed a perfect cross-section of the creativity, passion, determination and success thriving in the city today - and an inspiring antidote to the orgy of political, financial and actual violence we have been reading about in the (Murdoch owned) newspapers over The Summer Of Shit 2011. Martyna is represented by the Enid Lawson Gallery in London. View more of her work here.

JMW TURNER 2011

Sticking with the seaside theme...tonight I managed to catch poet Owen Sheers examine Britain's changing relationship with the sea and its reflection in art on BBC4's 'Art Of the Sea'. I was reminded of this beautiful image (above) I had captured a few months ago, heading across the Millennium pedestrian bridge connecting the south bank's Tate Modern with the north side's imposing St Pauls Cathedral. 

Earlier in the day I had been to the Tate Britain in Pimlico to see their Turner and the Masters exhibition - comparing British Romantic painter JMW Turner's ethereal seascapes with the work of some of Italy's finest old masters. I realised that day that I hadn't truly appreciated the immense drama and passionate colour of Turner's canvases, presuming them all to be very dreary, grey and miserable seascapes. I had yet to experience the artist's utilisation of vibrant warm yellows and golds (pictured below) - as evocative and shimmering as Van Gogh's brightest paintings from his sunflower series. Capturing the photograph above, of the Thames in 2011, and seeing how successfully Turner was able to encapsulate its essence in his paintings reinforces my belief in the transformative power of art and the powerful, almost narcotic effect a striking visual image can convey. 

Above 3 images courtesy of Google.

SEASIDE SISTERS SOUVENIR SHOP, CLERKENWELL



Last night, my amiable friend Mr 'Craft Gives Me The Horn' Ginger and I headed to Clerkenwell creative hub Craft Central's pop up event, the Seaside Sisters Souvenir Shop. Exhibiting and selling an enticing array of kitsch, seaside-inspired vintage homewares and paper goods, the ground floor space overflowed with feminine retro charm, delicious home made baked goods and an extensive collection of nautical knick knacks.   

Including the charming and authentic seaside photographs above, the exhibition also featured tacky snow domes from various seaside ports, tea towels and other kitchenalia with retro nautical graphics. Customised handmade bunting, pretty cuddly toys and other cute, original gifts produced by the Seaside Sisters themselves were also for sale at the event.

The girls produce smart, iconic products reflecting an idiosyncratic, peculiarly British take on the seaside reflected in this great seaside rock cushion pictured above. The event attracted a lively crowd of creative eccentrics, dividing their time between checking out the fantastic wares for sale in the show and admiring the balmy late summer evening setting sun over Craft Central's warehouse rooftop towards St Pauls and Clerkenwell's Victorian buildings below. Read more about the Seaside Sisters collective and purchase their crafty wares here.

MATTHEW ROSE'S PARISIAN BOHEMIA

One of my artistic inspirations of 2010 was collage artist Matthew Rose, after seeing his October solo show at the Orange Dot gallery in Bloomsbury. Back in April of this year, Matthew was lovely enough to allow me to visit his studio in the faded bohemian district of Montparnasse on Paris' rive gauche. Ascending the grand staircase in Matthew's modernist apartment building, I was greeted by the amiable American artist and shown around his top floor studio/apartment - its warm, timber interiors punctuated by the endless stacks of cuttings, materials and messy paraphernalia characteristic of the collage artist.    

It was a real honour to finally meet Matthew in the flesh and have an opportunity to discuss his work, much of which had been featured on his various online presences including his sales blog here. Some of my favourite pieces included the the witty, tactile text-based works pictured below, each one featuring a clever satirical spin on a well known song lyric or little known artistic movement alike.  

Matthew utilises a range of imagery in his work, recontextualising innocent looking, vintage-inspired aesthetics (in predominantly pastel hues) to create nonsensical, amusing and often disembodied comic book style collages. His pieces evokes an almost feminine, retro Americana...a feeling of a more innocent time of soda pop, diners and juke box jiving. Combine this with the inevitable European influence years of Parisian residency has injected into his work and you have the makings of a very interesting body of work.   



This great poster below advertises Matthew's imminent Paris exhibition featuring his latest work and is available to download free from his blog here.

GOODBYE CRUEL WORLD : THE DEATH OF AMY WINEHOUSE

I never thought I would see the day I would receive two incredible texts arriving within 30 seconds of each other informing me of Amy's death. I mean, yes, I knew she was a caner obviously out of control on various substances and/or mental illness. But somehow, some way I always seemed to dismiss the whole sordid spectacle as a gutter press beat up or some anonymous tool uploading videos online purely to then vent abuse about her skankiness. We've all been shitfaced in our time and half the stories I read just seemed like rock n roll behaviour exemplified - 'high spirits' mixed with money, fame, celeb friends, a crazy personality and a newspaper-selling, car crash image. It just seemed to reflect what 'the kids' of contemporary London got up to and characterised what Camden, in particular is like.

Amy's membership to the 27 Club is obviously extremely regrettable and her loss means far more to me than any of that notorious club's other illustrious members. Cobain may have been closer to my generation, but he was American, male and (worst of all) grunge. Couldn't really get any more removed from my own personal experience. Amy, on the other hand, wove images (both lyrically and musically) utterly infused with the emotion, drama, chaos and sassiness of what it feels like to be young, female and fucked up. Laura Barton posted an insightful take on Winehouse's lyrical legacy on the Guardian's music blog yesterday, an excerpt of which I've included below. She touches on all the reasons why Winehouse was such a powerful performer and resonated in particular, with so many women. Read the full post here. 

Pop music had often cast women as sweet, bright creatures, but Winehouse's lyrics revealed something mulchier, messier. Here was a woman who refused to conform – not in the eccentric mad woman in the attic mould of Kate Bush or Björk, but a woman who chose to live a little wild, follow her heart and sing of the simple stew of being female. Her songs were filled with broad talk, cussing, drink and drugs and dicks, songs that could hinge on one magnificent, unladylike question: "What kind of fuckery is this?"

She sang openly of female desire – not the squawky, shrill sexuality of Sex and the City and Ann Summers, but something truer, more physical, more serious. She sang about the ache of the body, the need for emotion, the distracting allure of a man's shoulders, shirt, underwear. "When he comes to me, I drip for him tonight," she sang on I Wake Up Alone. "Drowned in me, we bathe under blue light."
She frequently gave her songs a familiar, almost domestic setting, a world of kitchen floors, chips and pitta, Tanqueray and Stella. "I'm in the tub, you on the seat," she sang on You Know I'm No Good. "Lick your lips as I soak my feet/ Then you notice likkle carpet burn/ My stomach drops and my guts churn." It was a verse that started off like a Degas painting, naked and intimate and warmly erotic, but swiftly dissembled into something sad and messy and ruined.And this, too, was key to Winehouse's lyrics – she gave you an image and then quickly swiped it away, a honeyed love scene soon dissolved into wretchedness; over the course of an album it gave the impression of a life of instability, lived from one ramshackle lurch to the next.
But there were constants – namely addiction and passion, the flaming five-storey fire of love she always returned to in Love Is a Losing Game, the ferocious, proprietorial female strength of Some Unholy War, the mind fogged by drugs and love and desire. In Back to Black's great tangle of pride and neediness we found a melding of the two: "You love blow and I love puff," she sang. "And life is like a pipe/ And I'm a tiny penny rolling up the walls inside."
The other constant presence was of self-recrimination and remorse. In her lyrics Winehouse seemed to show how she screwed things up – how she should never have played the "game" of love in the first place, of "teasing" her self-esteem, and of "this regret I got accustomed to". In Tears Dry on Their Own she gives herself a stern talking-to: "I cannot play myself again, I should be my own best friend," she warns. "Not fuck myself in the head with stupid men."

All images in this post taken outside Amy's house in Camden Square, North London, two days after her death. Amy Winehouse 1983-2011.