I inherited a bag of little people the height of postage stamps. I kept them in a drawer for a half life. I figured one day I might need an army. January 2020 I started saving empty glass jars. I wasn't sure what for. But one day I decided to populate these jars. Isolating little … Continue reading Jam jar diorama.
Perhaps I'm more intrigued with the ghost of John Simon Ritchie - useless musician, drug addict, spiteful bully, sneering poster boy - than I imagine? He returns to haunt me only ever once a year; I hear his rattling padlocked chain and the drag of those stolen engineer boots before I see him. Oh, but I … Continue reading Tea Stained.
The wind picked up & the air became wet & in-between trying to light the cigarette, the boy, turning this way & that, trying to catch the flame, started on some convoluted tale about how he had lost his girlfriend, got thrown out of his flat, & about how someone had stolen his hair clippers. … Continue reading Liam & Stan & Oliver.
Lunch was a joyless chore in South Shields. The allowed hour was passed in that miserable and stifled staff room of P. Marsk Hairdressing, where the legend We Make You Look Good - that irritating and irksome italicised 'Good' - bearing down erroneously from the brown wall behind him, into him, through his thinning crown, his dimming mind, … Continue reading Mirror 9 – JMW Turner [Shields, on The Tyne, 1823] postcard.
8 [photocopy of a snapshot] I cut Lillian's hair every twelfth week, dry it every sixth. It grows. I cut it. I dry it. It has become grey by increments; city pigeon to autumn noon, fading print to cigarette ash. Each accretion of tone slowly highlighting further her pink brittle cheeks, the pools … Continue reading Mirror (8): Pale Airman.
D. James' genre-mashing/-defying debut is described (rightly so) as a postmodern noir-detective story, but it reads as much more than this. It is a pseudo-biographic study of the elusive, mysterious, multimedia, avant-garde artist, Ezra Maas: one of the strangest artistic geniuses to almost emerge during the late 20th/early 21st century. For such a prolific figure … Continue reading The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas (Daniel James, Dead Ink 2018) – review.
