RE: WORKSPACE

I'm a project manager.

WORKSPACE

RE: TOP 5

I did the BBC's Big Personality Test (part of the Child Of Our Time series - which is great) because I had a lot of 'spare time' this weekend.

The Big Personality Test works out your ‘Big Five’ traits (which we refer to as ‘your unique personality fingerprint’). The Big Five test, or ‘Five Factor’ personality test, is a widely recognised and well-used scientific measure of personality.

RE: TOP FIVE

RE: TOP FIVE

It's good for everyone to get emotions properly out once in a while, so here are the top five films that make you cry:

1. The Notebook (This is so good! It makes big men cry.)

2. My Girl

3. Titanic

4. Armageddon

5. Romeo and Juliet

RE: TOP FIVE

My top 5 new songs are always here - http://russtannen.wah.fm

RE: TOP FIVE

The Top 5 favourite photos I've taken, in my view.

they all look better viewed big, I reckon.

TOP FIVE

Whilst any mention of a top five/ten/thirty-two smacks just a little bit of some sort of High Fidelity ‘best break-up songs’ theme, in essence a Top Five is nothing more than a good old-fashioned list. And by god I love a list. Lists should rationalise an otherwise jumbled mind, but here are just two I found about my person today:

Back to the theme, here are two of my Top Fives...

Top Five songs in my iTunes, according to play count:


Top Five things I enjoy more than I should:

Eating jam with a spoon
Staying in bed all day
Maps
The smell of sunburnt skin
Chaka Khan

RE: MOVEMENT

In less than a week I will be moving to Manchester. A city ive grown to love more and more. Im only away for a month and a half but im very excited about the move.

So much though has to go into a move to a new city, never mind a new flat. A sense of adventure beckons. After the 6 weeks where will I move too?

RE: MOVEMENT

Photograph of Phil Collins: They Shoot Horses 2004. I watched for 2 hours but I think it lasts around 7.

Ramallah, a Palestinian city under Israeli occupation, has been the site of much violence and political unrest. While not directly political, they shoot horses resonates with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The artist auditioned participants in February 2004 and filmed two separate groups of young people dancing during the course of a day without any breaks. Throughout, the production was interrupted by power failures, technical problems and calls to prayer from a nearby mosque revealing the elation, stoicism and eventual exhaustion of the dancers. The work is concerned with heroism and collapse and reveals beauty surviving under duress.

(Text from Tate Britain Website)

RE: MOVEMENT

My friend Jethro running the London Marathon this year.

RE: MOVEMENT

Photo:© Estelle Spirig photo blog

RE: MOVEMENT

Mid winter in central London.

RE: MOVEMENT

RE: MOVEMENT

The Shinkansen (新幹線) in Japan are super-cool. They travel at 186mph and you can smoke on board and and there's about a metre of leg-room between every seat. This was taken somewhere between Tokyo and Kyoto.

RE: MOVEMENT

"Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement."

MOVEMENT

RE: COUNTDOWN

www.deathclock.com

RE: COUNTDOWN

RE: COUNTDOWN

RE: COUNTDOWN

RE: COUNTDOWN

RE: COUNTDOWN

The Millennium Bug Crisis

Pope Gregory XIII adopted a calendar which kept track of time based on the year of Jesus Christ's birth. This went along swimmingly for many, many years, especially as other systems of measuring time were ignored by the Christians.

Then, in this century, people built computers to think for them¹. These computers were instructed that there were no years before 1900 or after 1999. So, come the end of 1999 (shortly after Jesus's birthday) the computers will start over, telling us that it's the year 1900.

So as we approach the end of the year 1999, people are rushing round trying to fix the problem.

Nobody is quite certain how big a problem the Millennium Bug will actually be. Some people are stockpiling toilet paper while others are blowing their noses with total abandon. A sustained theory is that the only machines that will truly be affected by the Y2K bug are time machines. This would explain why nobody has visited us from the future to allay our concerns.

¹ A good idea, since they had got out of the practice of thinking for themselves.

(from BBC's h2g2. A guide to life, the universe and everything)

COUNTDOWN

RE: TRAVEL

RE: TRAVEL

RE: TRAVEL

"I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list."

Susan Sontag

RE: TRAVEL

A form of travelling.

A Dérive (to drift).

In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there… But the dérive includes both this letting go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities.

RE: TRAVEL

RE: TRAVEL

RE: TRAVEL

At first, on that first journey out of the city into India, I found such sudden politeness infuriating after the violent scramble to board the train. It seemed hypocritical for them to show such deferential concern over a nudge with a foot when, minutes before, they'd all pushed one another out the windows......

Through the sleepy night and into the rose petal dawn, the train rattled on. I watched and listened, literally rubbing shoulders with the people of the interior towns and villages.
And I learned more during those fourteen constricted and largely silent hours in the crowded economy class section, communication without language, than I could've learned in a month of traveling first class..........

We left the railway at Jalagaon, a regional centre that boasted wide streets of commerce and bustle......The aroma of fresh, highly spiced food stirred my appetite, but Prabaker urged my onto the bus terminal.......

During the following three hours of that perilous acceleration, we rose to the peak of a ridge of mountains marking the edge of a vast plateau known as the Decan.
With prayers of gratitude and a new found appreciation for the fragile gift of life, we left that small bus at a dusty, deserted stop that was marked only by a tattered flag flapping from the branch of a slender tree.

Within and hour a second bus stopped.

Excerpt from ' Shantaram ' by Gregory David Roberts

RE: TRAVEL

RE: TRAVEL

TRAVEL

It will take all your imagination to conjure up the image of Delape as he sat before me. His face, which protruded from the collar of a heavy mac, was a maze of scars. They scraped across its granitey surface as igneous intrusions and his nose had rotted away leaving only two skeletal holes, entrances to the shadowy bronchial tunnels. The guttering light from energy saving bulbs that flickered as we clanked out of Gard du Nord did nothing for his complexion, turning it the same colour as old and dirt-stained bone.

It’s difficult not to pity someone like Mister Delape. It isn’t a charitable pity though, more an unwelcome heaving. While he spoke I had the unsettling feeling that he was, in some way, touching me. A sensation I can explain only as spiders crawling around beneath my intact seam of skin, which I’m sure I noticed him eyeing with some envy.

The man was an ex-pharmacist and self-confessed philanthroper who’d contracted the biblical bug whilst engaged in charity work in some hellhole North of Mumbai. He was recovered (I heard not-contagious) in the biological sense but had been royally fucked up by the virus. While he told me this I stared down at my suitcase, the leather of which was so old, petrified and fake that it had begun to peel in places, revealing clots of cheap wood grain beneath. When Monsieur had finished his mumbling I managed a brief glance at him and a nod. Satisfied the man grunted and drew his long coat tightly around him and stared out of the window.

At the dreary city of Reims a man named Maurice staggered into our compartment. He stunk of spliff and coconut butter and wore an obvious proclivity for hemp woven fabrics. I listened out of the corner of my ear as my rotted new acquaintance burst once again into his tale of North Indian orphanages and ecclesiastical chatter whilst the hippy nodded along vigorously. Once or twice Maurice spoke in a deep, phlegmy voice, which made what he was saying hard for me to catch, so I created my own version of the soap-dodgers slice of the dialogue. He spoke mainly about spiritualism and ecological apocalypse.

When he wasn’t talking Monsieur Delape was incredibly still. Still except the eyes, which darted back and forth tracking the flowing landscape. A crucifix jangled from his neck, passing into view now and again with the heaves of the carriage and he wore a recognisable look of sickly-sweet sedation shared by them that have succumbed to that type of mumbo jumbo. I had begun to slyly stare at him from behind the relative safety of a broadsheet. He was man who’d been peeled, ‘like a banana’ I thought. I think I mustn’t have blinked for a while because suddenly the scars on his face began to wind and snake in the tired jelly of my eyes. I let out a whimper.

Maurcie, the phlegmy floraphile, offered me a half of his Satsuma (it may possibly been a Clementine) just after we crossed the Czech border. I declined his polite offer and turned to look at the window instead of through it. At the smudges of grease made by the fingers and the sweaty heads of travellers that had sleepily lolled into it. The passing countryside was a blur of boring greens and yellows, clouded by the streaks and smears of excreted human oils.

I turned to Maurice and asked him in broken French if he didn’t have a problem with travelling by a mechanical monster like our diesel fuelled sleeper train. He answered in broken English that in Prague the women are beautiful, wine is cheap and he is young. He smiled at me before fishing around in his pocket for some dog-ended roll up he’d saved from earlier. It was a strange kind of moral ambiguity that floated the French man’s ship.

“How beautiful?” I asked.

I travelled to Prague with a leper and an artisan. They were both strangers and not part of any deliberate gang, but undesired companions on the eight-hour train ride from Paris. I leant nothing except for skin is important at keeping your insides in and away from the sickened stares of strangers on public transport.

RE: COLLABORATION

Mitochondria are found within almost every human cell. They are possibly the single most important part of the complicated biological construction that is our bodies, as they perform the chemical process of respiration. These tiny organelles, much smaller than an individual cell, transform oxygen and sugars into energy, which allows us to survive in the form we do.

However Mitochondria are thought by scientists to be the descendents of endosymbiotic lifeforms; organisms that survive within the cells of other species, sometimes to the detriment of the host or, as with the mitochondria, to the mutual benefit of both life-forms.

I learnt this when I was fifteen or so and it has never stopped fascinating me. That my body which seems so inherently singular, could be formed of such a degree of autonomous and alien parts, is both interesting and scary.

I am a compound. A multitude. Complex and multifarious. Which begs the old and rather clichéd question; ‘In that case, which part is me’.

RE: COLLABORATION

so me and my BFF Fran did a shoot together on the Isle of Sheppey some time. we both took photos as did Matt King. the model was Ian Martin. not normally my kind of thing but I really enjoyed it. You can visit Frans blog here.

RE: COLLABORATION

RE: COLLABORATION

These pictures have been takken by Gabee in Vancouver a couple days ago.

Gabee is a part of our collective "FY!" and my best friend for years.
He worked with different customers like: Rock bands, Radios, High school, tranZport snow&skate shop and obviously, his personal shooting.

So let's have a peak on,
Enjoy!

RE: COLLABORATION

Christo and Jeanne-Claude

Wrapped Trees, Fondation Beyeler and Berower Park, Riehen, Switzerland 1997-98

Photo: Wolfgang Volz, ©Christo 1998

RE: COLLABORATION