Roving Eyes
Iris Ollier presents sculptural objects which subvert normal visual perception. Objects of wonder and novelty create abnormal optical effects. These emphasise that movement is not a conscious decision, but emerges from (and is the natural sequel to) vision.
There are many aspects of being which we enact tacitly. That vision and motion are so extraordinarily enmeshed is a human operation that we give no thought to. We are immersed in the visible by the body, which is itself visible.
We see only what we look at.
Excerpt from the exhibition text ‘Roving Eye’ at SAW, 01-16 Feb 2023.
Love poems:
Recently sleepy I lie awake,
I am full up to the brim with thoughts of you,
they shunt and runtle around,
craving respite.
I wonder what the weather is like where you are?
you say it is wet and dismal.
I spent today a lizard baking on slate
drenched in gold,
what distance?
what would have been a spiral is replaced by a fantasy:
I see us walking a dog with a fluffy tail;
I see us dancing in swathes of white and black and blue,
I see you on a piano stool,
a spoon backed armchair.
so often I look at you in awe
I wonder if you see an equal when you look at me,
what an honour that would be.
____________
Love and loss poem:
I remember you made that little film:
See it Say it Sorted
you had filmed yourself spray painting London, covering our city with your name.
There were shots of you above high street shops, on bus stops and park walls
All with the caption
“Found on google images”
I never understood why you hated the British Transport Police.
It was always hazy with you
No.
Dogs piss on street corners and I think of you,
I’m sorry,
It’s true.
I know that’s not what love’s supposed to do.
But you’ll never know what I think again, will you.
Diary Entry
I aspire to the diary habits of politicians and autobiographers.
I write this from my local pub, the artisan bar, which is surprisingly full for 2pm on a Friday afternoon. I don’t come here very often, but this is by far the fullest I’ve seen it. The horse races are on at Cheltenham, and punters are busy placing bets. Usually we go to the gay pub up the road, The Regent. We love the regent for its rainbow bunting and hot gay bartenders, and I think the girls feel uncomfortable in pubs like this one: dark, full of real ale drinkers and raised eyebrows. I love these kinds of pubs. I love real ale and locals who hate Londoners (me). They know and I know that I am raising the prices in their area - and I wish I weren’t, since it’s the prices that brought me here to begin with.
I did a module on gentrification in my second year of art school. My professor mostly talked about Glasgow, Brixton, Newcastle and Greenwich, New York. It’s strange to find parallels between resistance to the construction of Manhattan highways and student accommodation in Newcastle, but student accommodation in Newcastle was new enough and close enough for us to relate to Jane Jacobs’ campaign to save Washington Square Park. Artists are often blamed for gentrification, which, as an artist, is fucking unfair. I suppose this is why Mr Weeks whose to teach this module — so that we might understand our place in the broader political landscape. Artists tend to like to live in cities, since art is a social practice as well as studio practice. Artists like to engage with their communities through workshops, exhibitions, and the odd mural. We are involved in our locale; we are social animals. Artists, therefore, move to affordable areas in cities (since artists make no money) and unwittingly make them “cool,” which attracts yuppies, which in turn forces the original occupants of the area out. Or at least this is the received wisdom about gentrification.
I walk into the bar again on a Sunday afternoon - since I am incapable of doing anything useful in my own home - and a bald man slides 3 fillet steaks and corresponding sachets of peppercorn sauce away from me, along the bar. He jokes that considering the price of food these days, he’s got to watch out for light-fingered ladies pinching his meat. I laugh. I thought it was pub meat and hide my disappointment. I am not used to men being friendly towards me. Perhaps it’s because I keep coming back here, planting my pint of real ale on the two-tiered table and my heels on the stool opposite with a space grey macbook on my lap. Probably it’s because I asked the bartender if they were going to show the Newcastle game (they’re in the final of the Carabao Cup). 3 Steaks turns out to be a Maccam [colloquial name for a person from Sunderland]. I tell them that I lived in Newcastle for 4 years and that I have a hard time watching Newcastle play my hometown team; I am confident that they will beat Liverpool in the final. Liverpool have much bigger fish to fry this season, and likely won’t have prioritised this tournament. They notice that I’m an Arsenal fan as well, and disapprove of my split allegiances through gentle jokes about how easy it must be to be a fair weather fan. I demur that it’s hard when you love two cities but yes I do struggle when they’re pitted against each other. They contend that I am an alcoholic just looking for an excuse to “continue” drinking in the pub. Arsenal won earlier, and I think Newcastle will win now. Internally I protest the implication that I’ve been at the pub all day. I only noticed it drenched in sunlight from my bedroom window maybe 30 minutes prior.
Usually, I’ve come here with my ex boyfriend to half-watch the football, or as a reward for his long drive up from Durham. These past few days I have been coming here due to a debilitating inability to do anything effective or creative in the house. It’s consistently a problem - it’s so much easier to just do one thing when I’m out of the flat. At home there’s cleaning, deciding on outfits, endless cups of coffee, curling my hair and yet more cleaning. The pub doesn’t make me feel unwanted in the way a coffee shop does. How long can I reasonably spend drinking a cappuccino? Long live the artisan bar.
Often I feel uncomfortable about liking things that are conventionally blokey. Men tend to assume I am doing it for their benefit, women sometimes assume the same. Many many times have I ordered a drink at the pub and the bartender or other nearby male will say something to the effect of “who are you trying to impress?” when really I just love room temperature beer. I love pubs for their britishness, their warmth, their victorian bars and salon-style hanging of mirrors-as-adverts, photos of boys on horses, beermats and upholstery. The wooden banquettes in pubs remind me of the pews of churches (lol). I like pool, snooker, football, beer. When I was in Melbourne, the most British place one could be while also being so far away, i longed for pubs.
In the feedback i sought from my mother, she asked me how i could even go to the pub on my own at all. in my heart I suppose I feel like a man. I deeply resent that this feeling is not mutual, and that men will always see me as a woman first, and a person second. Yet as I move through the world, I feel that the world is open to me, that I can take up space in it. That everybody wants you to think they’re nice.
As I commend myself for having such a natural interaction with the men with the steaks in their pockets, I reflect on the module I studied under my 2nd year tutor, which expanded on the narrative of artists-as-gentrifiers, and implicated property developers, urban planners, local councils, billionaire DJs — basically everyone who actually has some capital. Brixton Market is the most amusing yet egregious example of property developers destroying small/local businesses. Texan billionaire baby DJ Taylor McWilliams bought most of Brixton Market in 2018 and raised the rents on every stall-holder, and as you can imagine, the landscape of Brixton market was transformed (citation needed). Brixton, as I knew it as a teenager in London, was an exciting part of town that you might not tell your parents you were partying in. There were exciting things happening in Brixton: great music and clubs. There was a vibrancy to the street markets and a motley of delicious smells floating through the air, which I don’t find there now. Artists moved to Brixton because it was affordable and already pretty cool, for being so multicultural. It’s on the Victoria line, and therefore close to central London. For that reason of infrastructure, I wonder if Brixton was always destined for the transformation it’s undergone. It was the local council who chose to pedestrianise roads around the station, and this more intimate style of urban planning endears the area to persons whom Richard Florida labelled the “creative class.” The creative class, in my eyes, tends not to be artists but rather people working in marketing, film, tv, and the other more lucrative parts of the creative economy. They are nomadic, wealthy, and like having good cafes and nice restaurants on their doorstep. One of them is next to me at the pub right now, belting bullshit at a girl in a red jumper. His is by far the loudest voice.
It would be remiss of me to absolve myself of any responsibility, and indeed the area in which I live is very obviously already ‘on the up.’ There is no shortage of florists, cafes, charming restaurants. I think of [restaurant and wine bar] Montrose, which opened on my street a few months ago - very chic, the logo in a traditional Scots font hand-painted above the door. It’s famous for its oysters. Red kite cafe, where your cappuccino is perfect, sits opposite Cherry’s Cafe, a delightful turkish owned caff-not-cafe nestled between vape shops and the Abbeyhill colonies. The colonies have been a hotbed of artistic activity since the 1980s, or so they claim when marketing the annual colonies open house/open studio, and I’m inclined to believe them.
Ant and Dec are on the TV screen, holding Newcastle United scarves emblazoned with ‘Howay the Lads’ over their heads. As Newcastle score their second goal against Liverpool, overall volume in the pub increases, drowning out my loathed poshboy. Right now he seems to be mocking an interest in football. Easy to mock, but definitely the wrong setting. 3 Steaks, from earlier comes over and presents me with a small bottle of Prosecco and a wine glass, since we have cause to celebrate! Newcastle are 2-0 up in the 65th minute. He doesn’t know I hate prosecco. We’ve not spoken or looked at each other since our earlier run-in, it in no way felt like he was hitting on me. Perhaps it’s naeive of me, but I am amused by the whole thing. He’s so glad his team is winning. Newcastle go on to win the game and thereby the Carabou Cup, which is big because Newcastle United hadn’t won a national trophy in 70 years! It’s hard to overstate how big of a deal this is for Newcastle fans. He quickly dances back to his friend. I decide it’s probably not roofied and raise my glass, meet his eye, smile and mouth “cheers!” and grins cross every face between us. I feel like I am embedding myself in the lifeblood of Abbeyhill, starting down the track towards a season ticket at Easter Road Hibernian Stadium.
Can you become a local while sporting a southern accent? I am not sure. After moving further and further north in the past 5 years, I have a third-person experience of my own diction in certain company. And can you be the fan of two clubs? Football allegiances are supposed monogamous - tribal. Purporting to support Arsenal is part of how I feel connected to my hometown. It’s ugly to admit I feel much more connected to Newcastle fans - it’s the only jersey I’ve got.
I also think about how my identity changes based on my location in one quite obvious way. I’ve noticed that I became white in the north of England or Scotland. This is through no change of my behaviour really, but due to the fact that these regions are predominantly (entirely?) white. White girls’ proclivity to tanning has rendered my brownness imperceptible. I am very fair skinned, duh, but the diversity of London broadens the scope of why you might look the way you do. In London no one doubts what I say I am, which is that my mother is Indian and my dad is English. That I was raised by my (Indian) mother, and now our family is all over the Anglosphere. We are migrants.
Here in Edinburgh basically everyone is Scottish. And anyway I am a white girl: I was born in London, I only speak english, i am pretty good at darts. The boy next to me, who barely shut up for the 2 hours I sat next to him, with his arrogance, his insistence that the girl next to him gave a shit about anything he had to say, jarred me with his accent. He has drunk 8 Yakults in the time? Likely the reason he affected me so much is because I am troubled by my likeness to him. I too can be loud, inconsiderate.. and I’m very proud of being from London. My ex boyfriend from Co. Durham finds me a total embarrassment for all the same reasons I abhor my poshboy pub neighbour, I think to myself.
Can we become natives, just for a little while? Obviously not — and indeed just as much as i know I am not from here, I know I will leave. So why do I want to fit in so badly? I have noticed, and my mother points it out, that only the middle class move around. And in our moving around we displace native communities. Richard Florida recommends that local authorities attract the ‘Creative Class’ which is nomadic, affluent, and often working in creative industries, and Easter Road is looking very nice these days.
People tell me stories and I steal them for myself. Edit them, embellish them, tell them in as few words as possible.
How do you even write, anyway? What do you start with? Do you start with a story or do you just write about stuff that’s really happened? All my best stories are things that didn’t really happen, but also totally did.
Instead of doing this I could be watching TV.
Maybe as I am writing this I am watching TV — it’s all the same to you.
I am browsing Artjobs.com thinking about how only a friend would hire me for a job I have no relevant experience for.
I am invigilating my friend’s exhibition for free because I like them but all the chairs are uncomfy. All I can ever think to do when I am invigilating is browse artjobs.com and think about all the jobs I don’t have. There are thousands of them, and probably millions more that I can’t comprehend. David Graeber writes that 40% of people have jobs that they secretly believe are completely unnecessary. But it is easily 40% of employed people that I am envious of in this moment.
I go back to watching TV. wait — no I don’t.
Occasionally visitors come into the gallery and I have to stop not-watching TV (applying for jobs) and sit up. I have installed myself inside an installation made of a bean bag and a trick:
There are two bouncy balls, one is made of a shatter-prone resin.
Guess which is which
(no touching).
Some stories just come out of nowhere. Yesterday I was having lunch with the ‘experts’ at the _networking event I organised. I should have been on the form of my life. (Instead) we were talking about the sweet communion of former emo kids. We have it in common. When I was 14, one of my best friends/fellow emo was an impossibly beautiful girl called Alara. She had invested quite a lot into her outfits and wore those lacy Lolita dresses, the ones covered in delicate frills and little bows. She often had neon coon-tails clipped into his hair and a side-fringe it would have taken me another couple years to grow. In her school uniform she wore her tie short and knee-high socks every day, sometimes with stripes. Despite how much I wished I was her, we were very close friends; we both loved My Chemical Romance _ — it could even have been an early crush tbh_until one day she stopped coming to school.
_She lived with her mum, nearby, above a corner shop, but when we tried to check in on them, no one was home.
We had short attention spans. Bad things only happen to other people. Maybe she’d had enough of us and made a French exit.
I have the experts in the palm of my hand. Sure, we’ve been reminiscing about how silly and embarrassing teenagers are, but now they are my captive audience.
Life is funny like that. You never know where the stories are going to come from.
In 2016 I was walking down a residential street where I grew up, and across the street Alara is standing there looking at her phone on a street corner. In a café she tells me that she’s only been back in Duckett’s Green for a few weeks, that her uncle abducted her and, after a year and a half, forced her to marry a complete stranger. When her aunt heard of the marriage she flew back and managed to rescue her. That was why she was back in the neighbourhood.
At a networking event what possible reason could I have had to delve into that story. It was a story I’d forgotten myself, a nugget from adolescence that spat itself out because it heard us talking about creepers and coon-tails. It’s an addendum to the history of 00’s emo style no one asked for.
The problem with that story is that it isn’t actually one of mine. Every little morsel of the story she could give me in that café fed my appetite for solving the mystery. It was huge: I finally got to know the end of a story I’d forgotten I needed to know the end of. I didn’t stay in touch with her. She started dating my ex-boyfriend, the boyfriend I had had when we had been friends in school (which was a trip, but I was happy for him because he definitely always fancied her when he was going out with me).
When I was 14 I didn’t know that I thought bad things only happen to other people. Now it still feels a bit like bad things only happen to other people, certainly when bad things do end up happening to me I want to stomp around and ask ‘why me!’ I tell myself that it’s ok that I tell people about Alana, because bad things only happen to other people until they don’t.
____
My first night alone I dreamt of my father
Freud the smug bastard
He came to visit me in a place I don’t live
On some foreign balcony smoking a cigarette
It’s hazy now
There was rope everywhere
piled up in loops lost in a shadow
I asked him why he’d never come before
Why it had been so long?
two years, you know
time flies
I accused him of never coming before
Where have you been
I’ve been here all along
and why are you here now?
It’s not you who has wronged me
I aspire to the diary habits of politicians and autobiographers.
I write this from my local pub, the artisan bar, which is surprisingly full for 2pm on a Friday afternoon. I don’t come here very often, but this is by far the fullest I’ve seen it. The horse races are on at Cheltenham, and punters are busy placing bets. Usually we go to the gay pub up the road, The Regent. We love the regent for its rainbow bunting and hot gay bartenders, and I think the girls feel uncomfortable in pubs like this one: dark, full of real ale drinkers and raised eyebrows. I love these kinds of pubs. I love real ale and locals who hate Londoners (me). They know and I know that I am raising the prices in their area - and I wish I weren’t, since it’s the prices that brought me here to begin with.
I did a module on gentrification in my second year of art school. My professor mostly talked about Glasgow, Brixton, Newcastle and Greenwich, New York. It’s strange to find parallels between resistance to the construction of Manhattan highways and student accommodation in Newcastle, but student accommodation in Newcastle was new enough and close enough for us to relate to Jane Jacobs’ campaign to save Washington Square Park. Artists are often blamed for gentrification, which, as an artist, is fucking unfair. I suppose this is why Mr Weeks whose to teach this module — so that we might understand our place in the broader political landscape. Artists tend to like to live in cities, since art is a social practice as well as studio practice. Artists like to engage with their communities through workshops, exhibitions, and the odd mural. We are involved in our locale; we are social animals. Artists, therefore, move to affordable areas in cities (since artists make no money) and unwittingly make them “cool,” which attracts yuppies, which in turn forces the original occupants of the area out. Or at least this is the received wisdom about gentrification.
I walk into the bar again on a Sunday afternoon - since I am incapable of doing anything useful in my own home - and a bald man slides 3 fillet steaks and corresponding sachets of peppercorn sauce away from me, along the bar. He jokes that considering the price of food these days, he’s got to watch out for light-fingered ladies pinching his meat. I laugh. I thought it was pub meat and hide my disappointment. I am not used to men being friendly towards me. Perhaps it’s because I keep coming back here, planting my pint of real ale on the two-tiered table and my heels on the stool opposite with a space grey macbook on my lap. Probably it’s because I asked the bartender if they were going to show the Newcastle game (they’re in the final of the Carabao Cup). 3 Steaks turns out to be a Maccam [colloquial name for a person from Sunderland]. I tell them that I lived in Newcastle for 4 years and that I have a hard time watching Newcastle play my hometown team; I am confident that they will beat Liverpool in the final. Liverpool have much bigger fish to fry this season, and likely won’t have prioritised this tournament. They notice that I’m an Arsenal fan as well, and disapprove of my split allegiances through gentle jokes about how easy it must be to be a fair weather fan. I demur that it’s hard when you love two cities but yes I do struggle when they’re pitted against each other. They contend that I am an alcoholic just looking for an excuse to “continue” drinking in the pub. Arsenal won earlier, and I think Newcastle will win now. Internally I protest the implication that I’ve been at the pub all day. I only noticed it drenched in sunlight from my bedroom window maybe 30 minutes prior.
Usually, I’ve come here with my ex boyfriend to half-watch the football, or as a reward for his long drive up from Durham. These past few days I have been coming here due to a debilitating inability to do anything effective or creative in the house. It’s consistently a problem - it’s so much easier to just do one thing when I’m out of the flat. At home there’s cleaning, deciding on outfits, endless cups of coffee, curling my hair and yet more cleaning. The pub doesn’t make me feel unwanted in the way a coffee shop does. How long can I reasonably spend drinking a cappuccino? Long live the artisan bar.
Often I feel uncomfortable about liking things that are conventionally blokey. Men tend to assume I am doing it for their benefit, women sometimes assume the same. Many many times have I ordered a drink at the pub and the bartender or other nearby male will say something to the effect of “who are you trying to impress?” when really I just love room temperature beer. I love pubs for their britishness, their warmth, their victorian bars and salon-style hanging of mirrors-as-adverts, photos of boys on horses, beermats and upholstery. The wooden banquettes in pubs remind me of the pews of churches (lol). I like pool, snooker, football, beer. When I was in Melbourne, the most British place one could be while also being so far away, i longed for pubs.
In the feedback i sought from my mother, she asked me how i could even go to the pub on my own at all. in my heart I suppose I feel like a man. I deeply resent that this feeling is not mutual, and that men will always see me as a woman first, and a person second. Yet as I move through the world, I feel that the world is open to me, that I can take up space in it. That everybody wants you to think they’re nice.
As I commend myself for having such a natural interaction with the men with the steaks in their pockets, I reflect on the module I studied under my 2nd year tutor, which expanded on the narrative of artists-as-gentrifiers, and implicated property developers, urban planners, local councils, billionaire DJs — basically everyone who actually has some capital. Brixton Market is the most amusing yet egregious example of property developers destroying small/local businesses. Texan billionaire baby DJ Taylor McWilliams bought most of Brixton Market in 2018 and raised the rents on every stall-holder, and as you can imagine, the landscape of Brixton market was transformed (citation needed). Brixton, as I knew it as a teenager in London, was an exciting part of town that you might not tell your parents you were partying in. There were exciting things happening in Brixton: great music and clubs. There was a vibrancy to the street markets and a motley of delicious smells floating through the air, which I don’t find there now. Artists moved to Brixton because it was affordable and already pretty cool, for being so multicultural. It’s on the Victoria line, and therefore close to central London. For that reason of infrastructure, I wonder if Brixton was always destined for the transformation it’s undergone. It was the local council who chose to pedestrianise roads around the station, and this more intimate style of urban planning endears the area to persons whom Richard Florida labelled the “creative class.” The creative class, in my eyes, tends not to be artists but rather people working in marketing, film, tv, and the other more lucrative parts of the creative economy. They are nomadic, wealthy, and like having good cafes and nice restaurants on their doorstep. One of them is next to me at the pub right now, belting bullshit at a girl in a red jumper. His is by far the loudest voice.
It would be remiss of me to absolve myself of any responsibility, and indeed the area in which I live is very obviously already ‘on the up.’ There is no shortage of florists, cafes, charming restaurants. I think of [restaurant and wine bar] Montrose, which opened on my street a few months ago - very chic, the logo in a traditional Scots font hand-painted above the door. It’s famous for its oysters. Red kite cafe, where your cappuccino is perfect, sits opposite Cherry’s Cafe, a delightful turkish owned caff-not-cafe nestled between vape shops and the Abbeyhill colonies. The colonies have been a hotbed of artistic activity since the 1980s, or so they claim when marketing the annual colonies open house/open studio, and I’m inclined to believe them.
Ant and Dec are on the TV screen, holding Newcastle United scarves emblazoned with ‘Howay the Lads’ over their heads. As Newcastle score their second goal against Liverpool, overall volume in the pub increases, drowning out my loathed poshboy. Right now he seems to be mocking an interest in football. Easy to mock, but definitely the wrong setting. 3 Steaks, from earlier comes over and presents me with a small bottle of Prosecco and a wine glass, since we have cause to celebrate! Newcastle are 2-0 up in the 65th minute. He doesn’t know I hate prosecco. We’ve not spoken or looked at each other since our earlier run-in, it in no way felt like he was hitting on me. Perhaps it’s naeive of me, but I am amused by the whole thing. He’s so glad his team is winning. Newcastle go on to win the game and thereby the Carabou Cup, which is big because Newcastle United hadn’t won a national trophy in 70 years! It’s hard to overstate how big of a deal this is for Newcastle fans. He quickly dances back to his friend. I decide it’s probably not roofied and raise my glass, meet his eye, smile and mouth “cheers!” and grins cross every face between us. I feel like I am embedding myself in the lifeblood of Abbeyhill, starting down the track towards a season ticket at Easter Road Hibernian Stadium.
Can you become a local while sporting a southern accent? I am not sure. After moving further and further north in the past 5 years, I have a third-person experience of my own diction in certain company. And can you be the fan of two clubs? Football allegiances are supposed monogamous - tribal. Purporting to support Arsenal is part of how I feel connected to my hometown. It’s ugly to admit I feel much more connected to Newcastle fans - it’s the only jersey I’ve got.
I also think about how my identity changes based on my location in one quite obvious way. I’ve noticed that I became white in the north of England or Scotland. This is through no change of my behaviour really, but due to the fact that these regions are predominantly (entirely?) white. White girls’ proclivity to tanning has rendered my brownness imperceptible. I am very fair skinned, duh, but the diversity of London broadens the scope of why you might look the way you do. In London no one doubts what I say I am, which is that my mother is Indian and my dad is English. That I was raised by my (Indian) mother, and now our family is all over the Anglosphere. We are migrants.
Here in Edinburgh basically everyone is Scottish. And anyway I am a white girl: I was born in London, I only speak english, i am pretty good at darts. The boy next to me, who barely shut up for the 2 hours I sat next to him, with his arrogance, his insistence that the girl next to him gave a shit about anything he had to say, jarred me with his accent. He has drunk 8 Yakults in the time? Likely the reason he affected me so much is because I am troubled by my likeness to him. I too can be loud, inconsiderate.. and I’m very proud of being from London. My ex boyfriend from Co. Durham finds me a total embarrassment for all the same reasons I abhor my poshboy pub neighbour, I think to myself.
Can we become natives, just for a little while? Obviously not — and indeed just as much as i know I am not from here, I know I will leave. So why do I want to fit in so badly? I have noticed, and my mother points it out, that only the middle class move around. And in our moving around we displace native communities. Richard Florida recommends that local authorities attract the ‘Creative Class’ which is nomadic, affluent, and often working in creative industries, and Easter Road is looking very nice these days.
Diary Entry
People tell me stories and I steal them for myself. Edit them, embellish them, tell them in as few words as possible.
How do you even write, anyway? What do you start with? Do you start with a story or do you just write about stuff that’s really happened? All my best stories are things that didn’t really happen, but also totally did.
Instead of doing this I could be watching TV.
Maybe as I am writing this I am watching TV — it’s all the same to you.
I am browsing Artjobs.com thinking about how only a friend would hire me for a job I have no relevant experience for.
I am invigilating my friend’s exhibition for free because I like them but all the chairs are uncomfy. All I can ever think to do when I am invigilating is browse artjobs.com and think about all the jobs I don’t have. There are thousands of them, and probably millions more that I can’t comprehend. David Graeber writes that 40% of people have jobs that they secretly believe are completely unnecessary. But it is easily 40% of employed people that I am envious of in this moment.
I go back to watching TV. wait — no I don’t.
Occasionally visitors come into the gallery and I have to stop not-watching TV (applying for jobs) and sit up. I have installed myself inside an installation made of a bean bag and a trick:
There are two bouncy balls, one is made of a shatter-prone resin.
Guess which is which
(no touching).
Some stories just come out of nowhere. Yesterday I was having lunch with the ‘experts’ at the _networking event I organised. I should have been on the form of my life. (Instead) we were talking about the sweet communion of former emo kids. We have it in common. When I was 14, one of my best friends/fellow emo was an impossibly beautiful girl called Alara. She had invested quite a lot into her outfits and wore those lacy Lolita dresses, the ones covered in delicate frills and little bows. She often had neon coon-tails clipped into his hair and a side-fringe it would have taken me another couple years to grow. In her school uniform she wore her tie short and knee-high socks every day, sometimes with stripes. Despite how much I wished I was her, we were very close friends; we both loved My Chemical Romance _ — it could even have been an early crush tbh_until one day she stopped coming to school.
_She lived with her mum, nearby, above a corner shop, but when we tried to check in on them, no one was home.
We had short attention spans. Bad things only happen to other people. Maybe she’d had enough of us and made a French exit.
I have the experts in the palm of my hand. Sure, we’ve been reminiscing about how silly and embarrassing teenagers are, but now they are my captive audience.
Life is funny like that. You never know where the stories are going to come from.
In 2016 I was walking down a residential street where I grew up, and across the street Alara is standing there looking at her phone on a street corner. In a café she tells me that she’s only been back in Duckett’s Green for a few weeks, that her uncle abducted her and, after a year and a half, forced her to marry a complete stranger. When her aunt heard of the marriage she flew back and managed to rescue her. That was why she was back in the neighbourhood.
At a networking event what possible reason could I have had to delve into that story. It was a story I’d forgotten myself, a nugget from adolescence that spat itself out because it heard us talking about creepers and coon-tails. It’s an addendum to the history of 00’s emo style no one asked for.
The problem with that story is that it isn’t actually one of mine. Every little morsel of the story she could give me in that café fed my appetite for solving the mystery. It was huge: I finally got to know the end of a story I’d forgotten I needed to know the end of. I didn’t stay in touch with her. She started dating my ex-boyfriend, the boyfriend I had had when we had been friends in school (which was a trip, but I was happy for him because he definitely always fancied her when he was going out with me).
When I was 14 I didn’t know that I thought bad things only happen to other people. Now it still feels a bit like bad things only happen to other people, certainly when bad things do end up happening to me I want to stomp around and ask ‘why me!’ I tell myself that it’s ok that I tell people about Alana, because bad things only happen to other people until they don’t.
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My first night alone I dreamt of my father
Freud the smug bastard
He came to visit me in a place I don’t live
On some foreign balcony smoking a cigarette
It’s hazy now
There was rope everywhere
piled up in loops lost in a shadow
I asked him why he’d never come before
Why it had been so long?
two years, you know
time flies
I accused him of never coming before
Where have you been
I’ve been here all along
and why are you here now?
It’s not you who has wronged me