Saltaire

   Back in the 19th century, when Britain was the world's greatest power, revelling in her technological lead, the Victorians assumed they were the chosen people. They thought Britain's good fortune was the reward of a benevolent, protestant god, rather than them getting lucky in the geography and geology lotteries and winning a couple of wars.
   So the richest and proudest industrialists built factories that reflected their imagined status. Buildings larger and grander than the palaces of old. The biggest buildings the world had ever seen. Built to make a statement. They said "I own you". They looked like this.

 Saltaire between the wars.

   Titus Salt's mill complex is the size of a small town. Everybody there lived in Titus Salt's houses, worshipped in his chapel, and worked in his mill. But 150 years later it turns out that we weren't the chosen people after all. The world learned to make their own woolens, and the mills all closed down. So, what to do with a colossal, redundant factory?
    A fellow called Jonathan Silver thought he knew. How about sticking an art gallery in it? So he had a word with his mate David Hockney, who's from just down the road in Bradford, and the job was done.
   

   There's loads of Hockney's pictures in there. I sneaked these shots when the attendants were distracted.
    The BBC 'Imagine' film about Hockney's bigger picture was showing on a loop, so I sat and watched it for the first time. It's about his paintings of the East Riding landscape. When you look at Hockney you could guess that he was from Yorkshire: he's got the jutting chin annd flinty eyes that seem to develop as yorkshiremen get older. Nice to see footage of the world-famous artist stood in laybys, painting the huge skies and empty fields of the wolds.
   And the place isn't just about him. There's a section dedicated to the history of the place and the trade. When I visited there was a bunch of kids being told what their fate would have been back in those days - stood at a loom for twelve hours a day, six days a week,in the racket and heat, for the whole of their lives. And this was a model village, built on the countryside to get the workers out of the hellish Bradford slums. Most lives were much, much worse.
   If you want a taste of life in a cotton mill, go to Quarry Bank Mill at Styal. They've got working machinery, and you can see just how noisy, dangerous, monotonous and boring most people's working lives used to be.

Old Maps

  I love old maps. There's the beauty of them, so different from the dull ones of today. And there's the thrill of seing the places as they used to be - open countryside instead of endless suburbia, with collieries, workhouses and other extinct institutions scattered about.
   Old Maps Online is a good place to see them. You can look at maps of various ages and scales, and they don't seem to want any money for it.

Deviantart - Folksy for wierdos

   A couple of months ago I got obsessed with Norse imagery. And every time I googled 'norse dragon' or 'norse wolf' this site came up.
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   Deviantart is a bit like Etsy or Folksy, in that it's a site where you can exhibit and sell your work.
   Paintings, photographs, steampunk, poems, tattooes, jewellery....you name it, it's there.
   There's some beautiful stuff there, and some absolutely barmy stuff too.
  

Not as good as the book

   Has anyone ever seen a film and thought, "MUCH better than the book"?
   I haven't. Every film I've ever seen has failed. Some miserably.
   Dune, for example, took an all - time science fiction classic and utterly ruined it. Mainly by shooting twelve hours worth of footage - it's a very long book - and cutting it down to two hours. So it makes no sense. And then ending the film with rain? The whole point of Arrakis is that it can't bloody rain!
   There's not a whole lot wrong with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, I'll admit. If I'd never read it I'd probably love it. But it's not my personal vision of middle earth - you know, the vision you see when you read a brilliant book. And Tolkein made a point of never letting you see the Dark Lord - he was far too scary to describe. So what does Peter Jackson do? Lets you meet Sauron right at the beginning of the film. And he's not scary at all. So the creeping pall of horror that hangs over Mordor in the book is completely absent from the film. And don't get me started on that ludicrous eye...
   The Hobbit...I know we're only one film into a trilogy - but THREE HOURS LONG? My copy has 285 pages, as opposed to the Lord of the Rings' 1000-plus. So three films - that's milking it with a capital M.
    Judge Dredd. I haven't seen the new one, and I'm in no hurry to. The Stallone one...well, like LOTR it's not bad as a stand-alone, but the whole point of Dredd is YOU NEVER SEE HIS FACE!
   The Shining - the Jack Nicholson character was blown to bits in a boiler explosion, rather than tamely freezing to death.
    The Firm...the Tom Cruise character ran off with the money. The film had a lame, law-abiding ending.
    Schindler's List...the bit where Oskar started blubbing. The real Oskar wasn't like that.
    C'mon, movie buffs...prove me wrong.

Grids. Not that kind.

  We live in the country's grid capital.
   Look in the gutter. No, not at the tramp asleep there, or the litter. Look for the grids. Read what's written on them. I guarantee that pretty soon you'll see this...

   John Needham & Sons had two foundries in the town, making street ironwork like grids and manhole covers. And you'll see them everywhere in the country. I keep an eye out wherever I go and I don't know of another firm withg such coverage. Someone told me you can even see them in Hong Kong. Their main rivals round here were..

   J & S Eyres of Miles Platting. I met a woman once whose dad worked for them - real old-fashioned industrialists apparently, throwbacks to the 18th century.
   There's loads of variety once you start looking. Different areas have their own suppliers. It shows you how much industry we once had.

This is one of my favourites - Eagle Foundry, Salford, 1877, on Bramhall Park Rd.. The old ones are particularly beautiful as the iron weathers into this marbled texture. And they link you to a past filled with smoke and noise, the industrial revolution in full swing, when we made the modern world possible.

   It pains me to see them getting nicked, and pains me even more to hear the coppers whingeing about not being able to find the culprits. Here's a clue, coppers. They'll be pulling grids up, and paying frequent visits to scrapyards. Not rocket science, is it?

My Shit Life so Far

  Frankie Boyle's autobiography is one of the funniest things I've ever read.
  Some of the booze - related anecdotes will have anyone who likes a pint thinking "Yep, been there, done that". Though not to the degree he did.
   He comes out as a decent human being, at odds with his brutal comedy persona. A short while ago he did a week's hunger strike in support of some guy banged up in Guantanamo.
    Some people - lots of people - get po-faced and outraged at his witticisms. He shouldn't make jokes about Jordan's baby, they say. Or about the Queen being so old her pussy is haunted. It's not funny taking the piss out of this, that, the other. What they mean is, it's not right. That doesn't make it not funny. If someone laughs, then it's funny. And the fact that they don't like it ain't gonna change that.

Paul Catherall

 

   Paul Catherall makes amazing linocuts, mostly of London landmarks. With their flat colours they remind me of German Plakatstil posters from a century ago.

   I went to check out his exhibition at the OXO gallery on the south bank in may. Fortunately he was there, so I got to pick his brains for a while. Apparently the images are assembled piecemeal, like a large jigsaw. I've since tried it and it's easier said than done.

   He's certainly sold me on the sky-being-other-than-blue thing. Check out his site here.

The Wave

 

  This is a german film about fascism. Obviously it's a sensitive subject in Germany, and this film must be harder hitting over there. 

   The story starts with a teacher being tasked with teaching his class about autocracy. So he sets out to convince his sceptical students just how easily totalitarianism can take over a people by turning the classroom into a totalitarian state.

    He has the class wearing a distinct uniform. They snap to attention when answering a question. They march on the spot, to annoy the enemy - the anarchy class below. With alarming speed most of the class start to act as an elite. Dissenters are ostracised, percieved enemies are duffed up. The group - they call themselves the wave - have their own salute, and spraypaint their logo all over the town. It all gets horribly out of hand and, predictably, ends in tears.

    The point of this film is that it's a lot easier to set up a dictatorship than many people would like to believe. Tell a bunch of people that they are the elite, that they are right and enyone who disagrees should be destroyed, and you're going to get plenty who will go along with you. Dictatorships can be fun, if you're the ones doing the dictating.

 

Porno.

                                                  
    Lager! Lager!Lager! And lots of swearing!
    Porno is the sequal to Trainspotting. You may have seen the Danny Boyle movie, about a bunch of scots junkies and psychos on their merry ride to self-destruction. The story picks up ten years later, with the porn industry, rather than the drugs industry, as the main theme. The paths of Sick Boy, Renton, Spud and Begbie intertwine with characters from Welsh's other novels as Sick Boy makes a bid for wealth and glory by making a porn film in the upstairs room of the pub he runs in Lieth.
     I love the very dark humour of Welsh's books. It seems to be a very scottish thing. Frankie Boyle drinks from the same well. When I read something so twisted, yet so funny, that I think "What the FUCK...?", I also think "Wish I'd written that".
     Welsh is also great at writing in dialect;
    "Bit ah'm fuckin gaun past thair now n ah'm fuckin lookin at the young cunts n ye can hear thir voices startin tae fuckin well droap cause aye, ah'm lookin at thaim awright. Bit a shark disnae bother chasin fuckin minnows cause that's no gonnae fuckin well satisfy. Aye but they wee cunts are smellin fear awright n thir lookin shocked cause it's thir fuckin ain." Frank Begbie, psycho about town.
    When I got this book out of the library years ago I didnt leave it lying about. The picture above was on the cover.

Art in the Pen

   So you own a cattle market. Make a good living selling livestock. Then along comes foot and mouth - no livestock to sell. What's the obvious way to make some more money?
   Yeah, that's right. You organise an art fair. The artists can set up shop in the pens, once you've hosed the shit off the floor. Obvious, really.
    And it really works. Art in the Pen at Skipton is a yearly event where painters, printmakers, sculptors et al gather to exhibit and sell their wares, It's not like a craft fair where any old tat goes - there's a vetting process to weed out the dross. So the stuff you see is pretty good.
    I went to pick some brains - primarily those of the linocut contingent (though thanks to one of the other exhibitors I'd already started messing about with acrylics). The artists are sat there, so you can ask what you like, and everyone I spoke to was very helpful and informative. Try doing that at the Tate.
    Ever heard of solar plate etching? Me neither, until today. It uses a light sensitive steel backed polymer and sunlight instead of acid to mark the plate. Lisa Moore showed me how she does it. Louise Jannetta explained her paper, thread  and paint constructions. Rosie Scott Massie demonstrated her map - based papercuts. And Debbie Williams and Kerry Tremlett gave me linocut tips. That's a lot of info for two quid.


   

No, not him. Or him.

   When I saw a book in the library with 'Charley Harper' on the spine, straight away I thought of this guy
.... the ageing punk rock idol. Somebody younger might have thought of this guy...
..Charlie Sheen's saner alter ego from 'Two and a half men'.
   In fact it was about an American artist I'd never heard of, who created amazing pictures of wildlife. They are often stylised and angular, but they look fantastic. I love them.
 

Piranhas eating cows, anacondas crushing jaguars, raccoon muggers - all simplified yet not diminished.

Big ships have little ships...

The American frigate Samuel B. Roberts being carried on board the heavy lift ship Mighty Servant 2.

Black Ajax

     
  

    George Macdonald Fraser is famous for his Flashman series, the fictional adventures of Tom Brown's bullying nemesis as he gets inadvertently involved in pretty much every notable incident in 19th century history. I'm a huge fan of these stories; they are historically accurate - I've learned a lot from from reading them - and very funny.

    His best book though, in my eyes, is set in 1810, and Flashman doesn't get a look in - though his father does. It's the true story of a black ex - slave called Tom Molyneux, who made his way to these shores with the intention of fighting Tom Cribb, champion of England. Which meant the world, back then.

    Boxing - bare knuckles in those days -  was as big a national obsession as football is now. Though illegal, it was followed be everyone, from the King on down. Prize fights would be organised in secret, and thousands of spectators would swoop on some lonely bit of countryside, preferably where several counties met, to facilitate escape should the law arrive.

  After battering a couple of lesser pugs in fine style, Molyneux eventually had his fight with Cribb. It was a close run thing, with many thinking, then and now, that Molyneux was gypped out of the title by sharp practice and biased refereeing. Nobody wanted a foreigner to lift the crown, let alone a black one. There was a rematch, but by then Molyneux's penchant for drinking and womanising had caught up with him and he was roundly thrashed. He died of liver failure eight years later in Galway.

   What I love about this book is the astonishingly vivid description of Georgian London in its boozy, violent heydey. So much more fun than the grim grey puritanical hell the victorians made. Sometimes a single novel can spark off a lifetime's fascination with an area or a historical period. A book called 'The Kings of Vain Intent', abouth the third crusade, got me obsessed with the crusades and the history of the eastern mediterranean. And this is the book that sparked my passion for the georgian era.

   There's a local connection too. Lord Alvanley, one of the Prince Regent's sporting cronies, was sort of a local lad. He was one of the Arden family, who owned Arden Hall in Bredbury and Underbank Hall - now a Natwest bank - in Stockport. Trying to keep up with Prinny's spending meant that he had to sell the family estate pretty much as soon as he inherited it, though.


    This is a painting of the Fives Court, where the sporting set gathered. Molyneux is the black guy stripped to the waist in the centre.

Stuffing; not just for Turkeys

The creepy stuffed animals from my sister's house in Yorkshire.