Skyberries and Voidmelons or Voidberries and Skymelons

Fairytales illustrated with words, lovely intricate creations cut from books. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The Princess and the Pea. Rapunzel. Entire scenes, castles and princesses and such delicate trees, all made from words.

Today I saw Stories from the Enchanted Forest by Su Blackwell at the Long and Ryle Gallery.

Yesterday, I went to Kingston-upon-Thames and found some dead drops, created by digital art students as part of the un/orthodoxii exhibition. The Dead Drops website says "Un-cloud your files in cement! 'Dead Drops’ is an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space."

I found the locations of four dead drops altogether - one had been stolen, one had become loose and I couldn't connect to it, but I did manage to connect to two with a laptop and they worked fine. This didn't seem too bad, considering the USB sticks had probably been there for about 2 months. I was able to look at art created by the students, as well as add my own files onto the USB stick connected to the wall.

I was surprised the USB sticks did not have more files on them that random people had added. I imagined it would become like an old BBS with a collection of random files to download, with text files about how to get high on nutmeg, purity tests, sections from the Anarchist Cookbook, the rec.music.industrial FAQ, odd porn, or more up to date, random photos taken with a phone, strange music, weird videos, and so on, but that wasn't the case. Perhaps I will try other dead drops, not just ones in Kingston-upon-Thames, and see what is on them, and if I'm still disappointed, I can always create my own and fill it up with what I want to see there.

I closed the wooden box and it was just after that I heard a tapping noise. Tap tap tap. I opened it again but all that was inside were wires, so again I closed it. Tap tap tap, coming from inside the wooden box.

Some of the exhibits in the Good Wood/Wood Works: Contemporary Wooden Art & Craft exhibition at the Riverside Gallery in Richmond, that I saw last Tuesday, I just wanted to stroke as they looked so smooth and patterns sometimes looked so geometric.

I wanted to take up marquetry then too after seeing the work from the Harrow Marquetry Group.

I wondered how difficult it was to sew wood, after seeing patterns sewn into wood, such as colourful houses.

There were paintings of trees and photographs too, and pictures made from found wood, arranged, and misericords.

"You've entered the room. It looks empty. It looks silent. There is vinyl text on the wall.
Someone in their early twenties hands you this pamphlet and a pair of ghetto-style headphones attached to a small electronic device."

That was part of the text written on the pamphlet I was handed at the Translated By exhibition at The Architectural Association School of Architecture.

I sat on a grey exercise ball, staring at a black image, listening to an excerpt of Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. It was about the Street.

After that, I sat on an old garden chair (see picture), amongst some tin cans and a block of wood, looking at a picture of what looked like the end of the world, while I listened to an excerpt from Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland.

My mum and I sat in office chairs and looked at a map on the wall, while we listened to an excerpt from Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem, about Brooklyn.

We listened to other words also, but those are the ones I noted.
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After leaving the gallery, we ate at Planet Organic, and then headed to the river, where we jumped aboard a boat that took us to the London Eye, and the big wheel towered over us, and then the boat turned around and took us to the west, and we left the boat at Canary Wharf.

The London Ice Sculpting Festival was happening and although we did not get to carve polar bears from ice, as all the sessions were booked up, we did see lions, people, London buildings, and other things carved from ice, already starting to melt.

Friday night involved a failed attempt at the creation of Mexican Hot Chocolate Snickerdoodles.

I sipped a gingerbread soya latte at the station and jumped on a train to visit Bath and Marios. It was Saturday.

I visited the Library of unwritten books, but preferred the unwritten books in Portsmouth I saw and wrote about on August 15th 2004. I wonder if they are all still unwritten, or if some have now been written. Apparently the idea was taken from Richard Brautigan's The Abortion.

Marios gave me a book: The Kicking King in Letterland. I vaguely remember Letterland from my childhood, or something similar anyway. People shaped like letters.

I saw the Fifth Horseman, half horse, half man, with dolls' legs forming a mohican and toy cars forming a spine, and mobile phones and hamburgers and other bits of junk on the horseman's body, like the horseman had arisen from everything that was being destroyed in the apocalypse. It was at the Victoria Art Gallery in Bath, and created by Deborah van der Beek, in an exhibition called Out of old Mythologies.

Marios bought a kite, but I bought Groucho Marx spectacles, having concluded that perhaps I needed them for work. An episode of Eerie, Indiana involved an eye nurse who would brainwash people, so they became like zombies. The only cure seemed to be invoking laughter by wearing the Groucho Marx spectacles. My co-workers do not show any signs of becoming zombies, but I keep them at hand, just in case.

We watched Last Night, which I have seen a few times before, but always enjoy. The world is ending and it's the last night, and the film shows how various characters spend their last night on Earth.

The sun had already set and there were only a few pink smudges left in the sky, but the rain had stopped, so it seemed like it was time for a walk. An abandoned rusty box with a plug attached to it, lying on the ground, near to a river, caught my eye, but I couldn't work out what it was for. We walked upwards, through the mud, past dogs pawing at my skirt, and stopped and looked out over the lights of Bath. Tiny white moths appeared in the darkness, fluttering as we walked.

The sun shone on Sunday, so it was time for the beach. We arrived in Weston-super-Mare to find the sea was far out, too far to walk to through the mud, but there was a sea-filled pool to paddle in. From the beach side of the pool, it looked as if people were walking on the water. I ate a coconut ice-cream, blew pirate bubbles, and photographed the pier, which has been rebuilt after a fire, but has yet to re-open. Marios battled with flying ants and escaped, ice-cream intact. Photos on Flickr: Weston-super-Mare.

Back on the train, looking out the window at the sky, which looked beautiful and pink, and as the train went through Bristol, became full of hot air balloons.

A Yeni Vatan Turkish newspaper sat opposite me on the tram and I flicked through it, briefly.

Memories fade so quickly sometimes, I am surprised.

"According to traditional custom, Aboriginal people are abandoned if they cannot travel," the description of a painting told me, at The Shared Sky exhibition at the NGV.

I looked at star trails and photos of space, that did not look real.

I watched the reflections of people in the window of the tourist information centre at Fed Square, while I waited for someone who was asleep, and perhaps dreaming, at that point.

I saw Tim Minchin perform that night, as part of the comedy festival, and one story he told was of having dinner with a girl named Storm: "Isn’t this enough? Just this world? Just this beautiful, complex wonderfully unfathomable world? How does it so fail to hold our attention that we have to diminish it with the invention of cheap, man-made myths and monsters?" Full beat poem on YouTube: Storm.

A band played loudly in ACDC Lane, as we walked past.

A black-haired girl on the tram, sounding sad and angry, spoke to someone unknown on the phone, "I was jumping around, screaming," she said. As I listened to more and more of the conversation, it sounded as if she had been rejected from a band, and I felt sad.

"We hope you liked our messages", the pavement had written on it.

Do you ever have dreams that are kind of magical, but kind of post-apocalyptic? Maybe there are things that look organic somehow, like they're growing in your dreams, but when you examine them closely, yes, there are brightly coloured crystals and tree branches, but somehow trash is mixed up there too, bottles, mobile phones, discarded toys, weird things, everything feels different somehow.

Maybe in your dream you climb up a ladder and sit and watch over this strange world, or sit on a stool and watch it through binoculars. Maybe you get to the world by walking through a silver tunnel, that appears to be made from sticks and silver foil and moves in the breeze.

Perhaps you dream you're lying in bed and there is a rock hanging over you, or there is a weird mobile above your head, turning, or perhaps the bed keeps moving while you lie in it. These things happen.

My dreams are mostly ordinary, but this is my reality, this is real, at Melbourne's Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, at the current exhibition, The Water Hole by Gerda Steiner & Jörg Lenzlinger.

I stumbled upon a mystic symbol on Archway Road, painted onto a pavement pockmarked with gum. ruudboy identified it as a piece of Ben Wilson's chewing gum art. I kept seeing patches of chewing gum that had been painted bright colours all over the pavements around Archway after that, everywhere I looked. Apparently, in 2004, Ben Wilson was intending to paint discarded chewing gum found in Barnet to the West End of London, so there must be a lot of painted gum out there. I'll keep staring at the pavements.

Photos on Flickr: Chewing Gum.
More photos on Flickr, by Rahid: Ben's chewing gum art, and one sculpture.