Immaterial Scribblings

My encounters and experiments with theatre, books, film and photography. All content copyright CJ Bulford.

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Stavros S Niarchos, a beautiful tall ship I recently helped crew in a voyage sailing across the Irish Sea.

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Life and Death On-line

UK city dwellers and readers of The Metro may have seen the front page story this morning:

"Father learned of son’s death from post on school’s website"

Headlines on the front page are reserved for news that shocks, or inspires controversy. The prevalence of this article this morning just illustrates what I suspected already, that death is still a very pertinent issue in the on-line world.

It is rare that much will shock us these days, we are over-exposed to everything in a constant stream of scandals, sex and violence but the death of someone close to us is almost certainly the news that will continue to strike us right to the heart. The article above reported that the father of the boy received the news he was dead via the internet on the way to the hospital to see him, through the school's website and through Facebook, which already had a stream of tributes when he heard. 

I have recently lost a friend, and know people who have experienced first hand what a terrible, crippling shock it is, and what an inappropriate way social media is to receive such news. It detaches you from the event, they told me. You feel separate from it, not a part of what's going on, and the shock and disbelief are hard to shake off. They needed to talk to people to confirm it was real, and even then the initial disbelief lingered. Social media has become the broadcast channel for our lives, but most of the time it is just filled with banal trivia or gossip. That is what social media reduces death to, just another piece of gossip that hundreds of people at a time can feed off and spread around. Social media, it seems can resemble a community to us in many ways but in death, it distances and we can't connect with what we are reading.

From the tone of the article, I sense the father felt outraged by the revelation of such important, life-changing news in this way. The article went on to reveal he was suing the school. The lengths he is going to may seem a bit extreme, and money redundant in what has happened, after-all the school did not cause his death. The shock however is terrible, potentially crippling and the school overstepped a huge invasion of privacy to report on something so personal and intimate in this way.

So what should be done? Should death be a topic that is left out of social media altogether? Death can be addressed in a different way however, written tributes can be a source of comfort, through the way they create community around the tragedy in a form of group mourning. People who cannot be in the country for example, can join in and people can share memories and stories. Life can be celebrated. Death has become a part of social media, with dozens of sites dedicated purely to this cause. (See http://legacymultimedia.com/2012/03/05/our-top-six-online-memorial-websites/ for just a few!) People view the internet as a way of immortalising their friends and loved ones, in a way that a slab of granite cannot.

The issue here then really is the sensitivity surrounding the early stages. For my friend, another friend of ours sent out a group message asking people's discretion and to leave posting tributes until at least her family had been reached. The news still leaked out however, and some people did unfortunately suffer the same terrible shock of the boy in the article's father. The internet, and social media in particular, is known for spreading news impossibly quickly, and is beyond our control. Should it therefore be left to organisations like Facebook and Twitter to regulate it? Perhaps an alert system whereby posts to someone's wall can be blocked, a profile temporarily frozen? In future should there be a "deceased" option under a member's status..? Both these suggestions are unrealistic, for a start they are subject to easy abuse. You can easily imagine friends reporting each other dead 'for a laugh' and the hurt and confusion this would cause. Maybe a profile buddy up where you have a nominated person to look after your account when you die..?! See my earlier article on "joint accounts"!

I think we are going to have to naturally adopt a system among ourselves where discretion can be exercised. We are not so far removed from each other tat we cannot demonstrate love, respect, sensitivity or benevolence. 'Unwritten rules' exists in our social society, and I think this is a case where such a rule, or boundary, needs to be found. Friends know for example not to go after their friends recent ex's... at least most of them do. We know capitals on-line are not decorous, and CAN BE TAKEN FOR SHOUTING.

Perhaps we just have to learn to hold back and keep sensitive, personal news for one-to-one conversations only, and tributes until after the funeral. Social media is just that, 'social', but is not a replacement for the real conversations we need to have in life and it is certainly no substitute for comforting words or a hug of condolence.

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Visual Poetics

Is it literature, or is it art?

The latest exhibition at the Saison Poetry Library, tucked away in the Royal Festival Hall complex on the London South Bank, explores the relationship between poetry and art by displaying poets that have taken their work into the 'visual dimension'. This includes poetry presented as sculpture, on everyday objects, audio-visually, as paint and collage work and in various unusual methods of print, including flashcards and hand crafted booklets.

Sarah Kelly presents her work in a collage format. Printed words, individually cut to size, litter the page at odd angles and in sometimes bizarre combinations. These are coupled with abstract paint work she has applied to the page, lines and colours muddled together. She titles the work 'Make My Eye Move" appropriately, as you find them wondering the page of their own accord and trying to piece together what the poem would have read in it's original form. It is not clear if there was one. The order of the words, and consequently the meaning, is in the eyes of the viewer and not the poet.

Matt Martin's takes this another step further with his work 'Geohedous'. His poetry takes a 3 dimensional form, consisting of multi-sided 3D paper polyhedrons in different colours with a word, or few words, printed on each side. Each shape is a different 'poem' on a subject, but there is no linear order. The poem is 'written' by rolling the shape, and speaking the word it lands on. The only rule is that the next word must be on a side that touches the previous. The poem is therefore written by the viewer/reader, and an element of chance. Only the words themselves are the poets own. Here are a couple I... should that be 'read' or 'wrote'? Each new side is indicated with a '/':

Brown

The dark/ fragmented/ and/ aged/ senses/ twisted/ riddles/ with/ silences/ echoed/ the limestone/ robes.

Lilac

The giant/ rocks/ formed/ the forbidden/ shapes/ the uprising/ clouds/ worshiped/ mountains.

It was a great experience to be able to interact with poetry in this way, giving the control and the interpretation to the reader/viewer. It is also a great way of illustrating how poetry can be formed, how simple and how satisfying and inspiring it can be, but is this really poetry? Can there really meaning behind words that have been arranged at random, without thought behind them? How much ownership can we claim when the words are not ours? I like the concept, but the 'poems' feel like the beginnings of something, not the finished result.

Other poems have an order, but their meaning is gleaned or enhanced by the method through which they have been presented. Sophie Herxheimer's work, 'Disaster' is a short and simple poem, is is the way it has been presented on a blood stained handkerchief that gives it a powerful impact and meaning through the tragic context it evokes.

Thomas A. Clark's work captures the essence of the primary question of this exhibition. He has presented his long, imagery rich poetry in an A5 classic Ruskin sketchbook. Opening it you would expect to find visual art, but the visuals it contains are in the words. Evocative, beautiful descriptions of nature and other subjects printed on high-grade sketch paper. Art and poetry, he illustrates, are both visual arts which require our subjectivity and imagination to process and understand.

Poetry is art, and art is poetry.

The exhibition runs until Sunday 5th of May 2013.

The Saison Poetry Library will (hopefully!) be open long after then, as one of London's (and the world's) greatest libraries. 

"The Poetry Library is one of the occasional pure flowerings of the imagination for which the English are so seldom given credit" - Philip Larkin

http://www.poetrylibrary.org.uk/

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Oak and Vine

This is the poem that is never finished. I must have written about 20 stanzas and have never settled on a version I am happy with.

This is a much shorter edited version, with a more positive tone than some previous incarnations.

It explores co-dependency in relationships.

  As an oak tree you stand,

Still young, but with a magnitude near ethereal,

As your trunk renders you immovable,

Standing firm.

Your branches stretch,

Reach out their arms, filled with leaves,

And small cups you fill with seeds,

For passers by.

Rustling below

I creep, a vine along the dark, wet ground,

Dark leaves, where no nutrients are found

My roots are starved.

Until my tendrils thouch

Your soft, green mossy trunk of oak

I reach up to grasp, not choke

I live.

Steadily, as a vine I climb

I cling to knots, sap moisture, drink up dew

And I bear fruit, something you, an oak could not do

We grow together, as two.

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Pigeon English

I had a very strange dream the night before last, potentially the result of watching too many zombie films lately. In my dream I was trying to escape a disease that was spreading across London. Started by the nip of a pigeon, as the infection developed a very strange transformation would take place...

The first signs are a greying of the skin at the area of the nip that starts the spread. The pink, fleshy human skin starts to peel away, to dry up and start to itch as it spread and greys and hardens. That's the earliest sign, even if you can't see the bite; an overwhelming compulsion to itch. The trouble is the more you think about itching, the harder it is not to! So everywhere you look you see the next potential victim. The greying skin then begins to toughen, stretching and tightening over the sinew and muscle. It's why some people believe they are stronger than us I suppose, the muscles straining more visibly under the taught skin. Others of course believe they are weaker. The stretched skin, combined with the rapid weight loss they go on to suffer from gives their limbs a thin and bony appearance. In truth, it doesn't matter either way because though they could still raise a fist to you, they no longer know how to. It's not in their nature. By the next stage, though they are still conscious , you know they don’t have much time left. A soft silver-grey down begins to creep over the skin, the beginnings of the steely-grey feathers that pierce through next. The drain on the keratin in the body to prepare the skin for armfuls of feathers causes the hair to fall out, not just on the head but all over the body and it is about this time the face shape starts to change. The skin, already harder and drained of colour seems to pull so tight over the bones they appear to be molded into shape by the force. The jaw is pushed up into the skull, so far the chin meets the nose, the mouth collapses in on itself. The cartilage and bone in the nose and chin come to a point about where the nose would have been, pushing the rest of what was once a face, closer together, shrinking it, stretching it, creating a ridge down the centre. A writhing starts beneath the skin as the new cartilage sets into place. Gradually, the centre point sharpens, hardens, becomes shiny and black. A few hours later, or I have seen it take as long as two days, the cartilage splits with a sickening crunch as it is wrenched apart; a beak. During this process the neck has lengthened, the shoulders have slackened and hunched and the eyes have taken on the intense orange of a London sunset. They are smaller, beadier, and sit either side of the ridge down the ruined face. The panic of the human eyes has left them, and their mind with it. Feathers have continued to grow, they stick out at odd angles and are uneven, but concentrated in patches along the back of the neck and down the backs on the arms. The chest has shrunk and hollowed considerably, the beating of the heart visible in the fluttering of the fragile rib-cage. The legs by now are a dark grey colour, toughened to the elements and scaly in places. The ankles appear knobblier somehow, the toenails have lengthened and toughened. Before long they will be scratching at the ground compulsively, and pecking too; their ruined bodies no longer their own.

I may continue to write up some of the rest of the dream, which was extensive and vivid, or it may just be too damn weird!

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Geoffrey Farmer: The Surgeon and the Photographer

Geoffrey Farmer's 'The Surgeon and the Photographer' opened in the Barbican's Curve Gallery yesterday. Although I wasn't familiar with him, a Canadian installation artist born in 1967, the concept of using photographic reproduction to create new artwork intrigued me so I went to take a look.

The exhibition features 365 puppets, one created every day for a year, from photographs cut from hundreds (if not thousands) of books and magazines. These puppets are not realistic or delicately made but consist of a combination of disjointed limbs, facial features, adornments, objects and text attached to an upright stick of about 30cm high, by means of a torso, and 'clothed' in various colours of fabric. Placed seemingly at random on plinths of different heights along the 90m corridor of the gallery, the sight as you enter the gallery is very surreal. Walking amongst them is both enchanting and slightly foreboding. Some are presented in groups, so you find you are picking out oddities in a crowd whilst others are in isolation for you to make a full 360 degree inspection. A soundscape plays in the background, disjointed noises emitted from all directions feature bells, hooves, cars, birds and the snaps of a camera shutter.

The title of the exhibition comes from the work of the German literary critic and philosopher, Walter Benjamin who recognised in Farmer's eyes, 'the potential for the destabalising of traditional aesthetic "ritual"' posed by photography and film, during their rise in the 1930s. He made a comparison, "The magician heals a sick person by the laying on of hands; the surgeon cuts into the patient's body" that Farmer drew on for this exhibition. Taking the two images, he has placed himself in the position of the magician, as the photographer but then also seems to have taken on both roles, by also becoming the surgeon. He takes the pictures, 'lays his hands on them' and then 'cuts' them apart. If he is basing his intentions on this comparison, it seems his aim is to 'heal' or mend, by taking apart and gluing back together fragments of art, and fragments of ourselves.

From the images he has chosen and his arrangement, it is clear to me that he is aiming to parallel and combine different aspects of ourselves and our culture.

All colours and creeds are represented here, mixing features on some of the puppets to create faces of multiple races, or depicting an elderly Chinese man with long, ash-blonde hair. I also caught sight of the image of the British flag, with the image of a lotus flower emblazoned across the puppets hands.

Age and time are also made obsolete as old and young, past and present are unified. Baby's arms stem from a women's face and black and white photos from decades ago are mixed with images of style and vanity that are right up to date; a Greek sculpture with arms covered in fake tan and fingers decked in gaudy rings.

The puppets are sexless, with men and women depicted on the same frame. There are a few graphic images that could be considered sexual, if you look close enough. One featured a women's face with a phallus for a nose, and I also caught sight of a few nipples here and there, but the overall feel I got for the puppets was a sense of innocence, or unawareness. Asexuality, perhaps.

Some puppets depict recognisable people, these images come from magazines and books afterall. I can pick Nelson Mandela out in the crowd, and George Orwell disguised with a women's eyes and a large cloud of cigarette smoke.

Pure abstraction also creates a sense of fun, and adds to the surreal scene. A haystack forms a head with eyeholes cut in it; some puppets have no legs whilst one has eight but no arms.

The objects Farmer has chosen are also very mixed, and when combined speak to us of the issues surrounding in our society. Machinery hovers in the air alongside the birds and a bright child's ball;  flowers and leaves protrude from their 'hands' but alongside guns and cigarettes; some faces are adorned with jewelry, others with images of gas masks and skulls. Life and death, peace and war exist simultaneously. The flag of the USA hangs low in a pair of old hands in a praying gesture.

Above all to me this eclectic juxtaposition of images reads like a commentary on our relations with each other, through our media. We have been re-drawn through our consumption of media on a mass scale, to all resemble bits of each other. In our realisation of this, we can all be united... or driven apart.

  The exhibition runs to the 28th of July 2013, The Barbican Centre, London EC2Y 8DS

http://www.barbican.org.uk/

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Water Abstracts

Taken on a Pentax K-r.

February 2013.

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Palm Sunday

Have you ever loved a book so much you wanted to swallow it and hear it playing in your head like a commentary? As clear as your own consciousness, relating itself to everything you think and do?

That's how I feel about Palm Sunday by Kurt Vonnegut. Every time I read it, whatever place I pick it up in and whether I read it for five minutes or 5 hours, everything just seems to make a little more sense.

"The people on this earth could be joyous, if only they would live rationally, and if they would contribute mutually to each others welfare"

I think we all need truths like that tattooed onto our brains at birth.

Gleaning insights from other writers, we can change our attitudes and consequently our lives vicariously through their experiences. Vonnegut had his own influences, and now I call him one of mine.

"By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well"

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Chew Your Words

Tonight has inspired new words; new words on words. 

Fresh thoughts on thinking.

Chew on your words before you spit them

We won't always be here to hear them

And we don't have time for time to waste

On words uttered with no meaning

On words said in desperate haste.

We know we think, yet we don't think

Of the thoughts of other thinkers

Breathers like ourselves

But distant

Even in close proximity

Our thoughts so full of deep complexity

Are ours to keep

Are ours alone

We try to press them, flesh on flesh

Into being on each other

Fingerprints, hot scorching marks

Bruises brown and green like bark

On a healthy trunk of tree.

But surface impact means so little

Flesh is strong, egos are brittle.

Chew on your words before you spit them

The body forgets but your memory keeps them.

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Alternative Nightlife: "Poejazzi"

Like fireworks in my head, this event tonight

(http://poejazzimarch-eorgf.eventbrite.com/ http://www.poejazzi.com/)

has exploded in my head and sent thoughts and ideas cascading through my mind like a waterfall in anti-gravity.

Creative. Captivating. Innovative. Passionate. Profound. 

It gets into your head. It gets under your skin. It sits in your soul, and you feel yourself caught up in the swell.

Can't believe it has taken me until tonight to discover the power of the spoken word on stage. I love performance, I love music, I love poetry. Tonight was the perfect blend, all bound together in the warmth of community, support and laughter. The perfect antidote to a cold Tuesday night, in a otherwise (so far) relatively cold and uninspiring March. I feel like I have found the tip of the iceberg, and now I am peering down below the surface to try and discover the rest, hidden below the surface. From what I have gathered, there is a lot more out there! And I am ready to believe that whole heartedly.

More on that. MUCH more, to come!

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Starlight

Standing alone on a clear night, outside of London, where the sky is black and inky as oppose to dirty-brown looking I looked up at the sky and thought. Thought, and thought. Just thought. It's not often enough we as an urban species do that anymore and I honestly think our dirty, polluted sky has something to do with it. We are gluing our eyes to screens, to moving pictures, from our desks to our pockets and back again without looking up.

On this particular night outside the city, I looked up.

Starlight

Glaring down in my eyes.

Tonight I can barely comprehend I'm alive.

Space, so vast, is weighing down on our heads.

Such a weight as that,

I can't believe we're not dead,

Already.

The stars and the sky are pressing down,

The dusk and the dawn are nowhere around

And I can't feel the heat, I can't feel the cold

I can't feel my feet and the ground they hold,

I can't feel my hands on the end of my arms and

I don't feel angry, I don't feel calm,

I can't feel my heart or the turn of the earth,

I just feel the darkness extending on past

The whisps of vapor and the souls of the stars,

The warmth of the atmosphere,

The cold of Mars,

And all that we know

And all that we've seen

Becomes nothing more than a fucked-up dream

In that dead-weight above

Extending on

Forever

And

Ever

And

Ever

And

Ever

And...

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Picked this up in Tottenham Court Road, one of the best places in London to find weird and wonderful books you never knew existed.. 

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Whitechapel Gallery

Art / Performance / Talks / Films / Courses / Late Night Events

Until this afternoon my opinion of the area of Whitechapel was not a great one. Having been to a couple of flat viewings there late last year the area brings to mind dirt, noise, crime, fast-food and that huge, empty hospital opposite the station. How nice then, to be proven wrong when I stumbled on the Whitechapel Gallery next door to Aldgate East tube station when walking back from a job interview earlier today.

The thing that first struck me about the space is how welcoming it feels. Unlike the vast caverns of the contemporary art galleries on the Southbank with which I am more familiar with, i.e. The Tate Modern and the Hayward gallery, you feel more as though you are stepping into somebody's house.

The reception area divides off into several small rooms with exhibits, their cinema and an elegant dining room but my eye was drawn by the small winding staircase, inviting me upstairs. I peered into a room on my way to the stairs and stopped mid-step, a full length tree, completely hollowed out, lay end-to-end out across the room. On closer inspection, the 'tree' was in fact a bronze sculpture, painted realistically to resemble a tree by first sight but filled with a beautiful gold leaf. On even closer inspection, you can still see the fingerprints of those who sculpted it, left intentionally as tribute by the artist to their dedicated work. Strange, and yet beautiful.

The gallery continued to be full of surprises which is what I loved most about it. The small rooms, which all lead off one another mean constant discoveries. I walked from an exhibition collecting together the contributors of Aspen magazine (1965 - 1971), a quiet little space combining wood with stained and textured glass into a white-washed, windowless space filled with eyes and children's voices. A slightly disorientating transition. Following this I discovered: a room filled with photos depicting the 'natural pleasures' of the photographers subjects; a room exploring time and our responses to it through old projections of news stands; a shelf of past and present science books, not under glass but just waiting to be opened; a room with nothing  in it but a table and different sized bottles of an unidentifiable black liquid...

The Whitechapel is the kind of gallery you can get lost in. It encourages exploring. It requires wide eyes, an open and curious mind and your imagination.

They also make a lovely cup of tea and a delicious lemon and polenta cake! 

[Image source: Wikipedia Creative Commons]

Whitechapel Gallery 77-82 Whitechapel High Street

London E1 7QX  

http://www.whitechapelgallery.org

Open Tuesday - Sunday, 11am - 6pm (Until 9pm Thursdays)

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Thoughts on Thinking

It seems to me, these days, that in our daily lives we have become so obsessed with 'doing' that we are no longer thinking. The majority of our lives are filled with routine, with what we have to do every day to put a roof over our heads and pay the bills every month. Here, most of us have little choice but to focus on the job at hand, but this is not what I am concerned about.

What I am concerned about is the space in between. Look around you on the tube on an average Monday morning, and nearly everyone is plugged into something, whether that be music, a game, a tv show, a kindle or a more traditional novel, or the Metro. Our world is full of distractions. They entertain us, but at the same time they fill our heads, they consume our attentions and our thoughts. They are also separating us from our surroundings. Where is their head-space, their space to think? How much of the day are we actually spending in the silence of our own thoughts?

Something else I have noticed recently, being the inquisitive (or nosy!) person that I am is that these same people who are plugging themselves into these media sources every day are not alike in what they are doing, but in what they are consuming. They are playing the same games, reading the same material. The number of times have I scanned someones Kindle with my eyes on a crowded tube train and seen the damning words "Mr Grey", or run my eyes over someones device and seen that annoying little man running through the jungle. Think how many daily readers the Metro has! All these practices are forming thoughts and opinions in the minds of the public, but what if they are all being formed the same? Mass Culture and Mass Media are relatively recent, after-all and the effects of it's influence are still in the early stages. It is evolving and expanding all the time, and expands of course far beyond the morning commute. We go home and see the same billboards, watch the same TV programs, shop in the same supermarkets, buying the same products... I could go on.

Ultimately, unless we allow ourselves head-space to develop, I fear we may be at risk of losing our sense of self. I honestly think some people, even myself on occasion , are scared of their own thoughts. Modern media and modern culture allow us to escape, and of course we need this to some extent. I also accept that these outlets can inspire. I love to read or watch a film that changes my perspective on something, but in order to allow this to happen we need that space to reflect. A back-to-back wall of noise keeps us occupied for the present, but gives us no scope of thought for ourselves, so provides no direction for our future.

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Great Expectations

We are in a perpetual balance of what is expected of us and what we expect of ourselves. I know a great deal of people who would contest this statement, believing they do not conform to other peoples expectations, but I disagree. The two can be mutual, for example: my boss expects me to be on time for work, I expect myself to be on time for work, the benefits of this are mutual. If I am on time for work I keep my job and make money, and so does my boss. Society expected me to pay for my train fare this morning, I have the same expectation of myself. I may not want to, there is no direct benefit in paying for me but my own moral code is in agreement with the expectations of society and of the law, that a service provided should be paid for.

But often these expectations do not match and this is what creates confliction.  Such a conflict is causing me a huge headache. My current problem involves my job. I am only just starting out in my working life, a very important time in my life as the direction this will take is being formed with every week, day, hour minute... that I continue to make decisions.

My expectations of myself and the expectations placed on me by society and everyone and everything around me, are doing battle in my head.

So the big 'life' question we have to ask ourselves at this point is this:

What do we want from life?

Which ultimately leads to the question:

Where is true happiness found?

In following our own gut feelings, aiming exclusively to satisfy our own life expectations, or should you knuckle them down and just relax, and let the course of following society’s expectations lead on? Be content with what it grants you? Be ‘another brick in the wall’, another ‘cog in the machine’?

From pleasing society's expectations, I could find myself fitting neatly into a place within it, all of my own, content that I have a job and can afford a roof over my head. I would be caught if I fell, that is what the welfare system is for. I could potentially sit and do nothing and still have a roof over my head! But I can’t help but listen to that voice in my head, my own expectations, telling me that it's just not good enough, that I want more from life. If I find it (whatever it is) that may be what true happiness feels like, but then we may not. Are our expectations of ourselves so high that we are doomed to unfulfilled misery? I feel like I have higher expectations of myself than society does!

Living purely out of society's hands is abdicating responsibility for your own life, because your options are determined for you. There is in some way, a comfort in this. Your own expectations are satisfied.

Life as a river is a popular analogy. If to let society's expectations guide you is to let go of the sides and float freely, is guiding ourselves, by believing and trusting in our own expectations, to motor along - or stick an oar in?

We do not know what society has in store for us around the corner. It is a world of twists and turns. It can feel some times like we have no control, and this creates anxiety. Letting go and letting other peoples decisions take over is a relief from this, isn't it? At least then if it all goes wrong we don't have ourselves to blame, either.

I think the real answer in this is to define and manage our own expectations better so we are acting in our best interest, because there is no other person to act for. Society is a faceless wall, it does not deal purely in rewards and pats on the back. It cannot be trusted to provide for you in the same way you can trust yourself. Rules can be broken, and are broken by everyone on a daily basis. We cannot even trust our bodies which can act out against us, for example through illness. We have to trust our minds, but that opens a minefield of other unanswerable questions.

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Photoshop

I've been experimenting with Photoshop a lot lately, trying to get the best out of my photos from my recent trip to Peru 

(Too many for 10 to do them justice, which is why you don't see them here, for a sample see my photostream on Flickr, "Chrisjbee")

Here I have tried to age a photo I took of some Inca ruins on the famous trail, so I can pretend I was seeing it as an explorer 100 years ago... 

The original:

My edit:

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Gaming

Whilst I am an avid consumer of most sorts of media, video games is one format that has for years left me, for the most part, underwhelmed and disinterested. I love books, I love films, I love art, all for their creativity and the pleasure I get from experiencing this as well as the immersive experience they offer. Games are another escape from reality, and a more interactive one that should surely be more engaging because of this, so what is it I am not getting? Lately, especially since I am now dating and spending a lot of time with a game designer who devotes his life to the craft, I am finding myself more and more intrigued.

My level of interest seems to be developing in phases. I have considered myself for a while now in the phase of a 'social gamer', i.e. In the same way a 'social smoker' and 'social drinker' operate, I play games only in the company of other people, for mutual enjoyment and as a way of socialising and feeling part of a group. Games like Guitar Hero and Wii Sports were designed with this type of gamer on mind, they encourage participation and friendly competition. The trouble is that the 'lack of company' has rapidly become a feeble excuse for not being a regular gamer. Nearly all games these days it seems you're playing as part body an online network of friends and strangers. This seems nice I suppose, except that aren't games supposed to be escapism? I want the people I'm playing with to behave properly as the computer intended! I can't imagine trying to co-operate with some of the gaming types out there, as much for their enjoyment and overall experience as mine. I mean I would be useless as part of a team of experienced shooters! and I'm not sure I could trust my team-mates not to shoot me in the back?! I have enough of those kinds of people-handling issues (albeit less life threatening) to handle in real life!

Despite this, I have recently found some types of gaming I enjoy. Skyrim at the end of 2011 really got my attention. I love the scope for creativity the game offers, the power of creating a unique character and building a life for it was in my hands which really appealed. It was like creating your own story, without picking up a pen. However. I have not played it in a long time and I feel if I went back to its now I would feel quite disconnected from it, I wouldn't be starting where I left off because I would have to redevelop all the skills I learnt, and I would struggle to remember everything too! It's not a storyline you can read back over, like with a book. I think of it now as my 'holiday' in Skyrim. I spent some time there, enjoyed myself but now I'm back in real life and it's not so bad without it. The Holiday Phase of gaming, I think I know some others out there who are in it. Or in the 'Honeymoon' phase of the gamer perhaps, where they allow the game to lure them in with easy levels and seemingly satisfying rewards before it becomes unforeseeably difficult and consumes more and more time and effort, becomes more and more frustrating to the point of quitting, they are on the verge of quitting games forever! But then another new title catches their eye and they go through the same agony all over again.

I've realised now though that my relationship with games is more like an affair, the 'affair' phase. I get curious about one, I give it a try and I love it for a bit, for a brief time but always go back to what I had before, a much more satisfying book!

Jody Playing Skyrim in true, nerdy nerdy-gamer style. (November 2011)