Murphy's Law

I'll be flying to Kasachstan for the first time on thursday via Riga. Something I've been looking forward to for several years now, but getting a visa proved more complicated than expected, and was a nerve-wracking experience.

We bought the plane tickets about three months in advance, and when I started downloading the visa application form just over a month ago, I realized that my passport wasn't going to be valid for the required six months after the return trip (it was only valid for five), so I looked up the British Embassy's website, which pointed me to the Düsseldorf Consulate, which is now the central Passport renewal office not just for brits living in germany, but also for a whole handful of neighboring eastern european countries as well. They had a passport renewal application form, which I printed. Then I filled half of it out, shaved (burning my thoat badly), grabbed an umbrella, took the metro to a photographer, forgot my umbrella in the tubes, had my bimetric picture taken, and picked up emily from her school -all in about 50 minutes.

When I got home I had to go shopping, and then cook a meal, after which I made the dreadful mistake of baking chocolate chip cookies before completing the form. Because of that I just made it to the post office before it closed, and sent off the renewal form and my old passport without the photos. I only realized that I had forgotten to include the photos when I got back from the post office to take the cookies out of the oven. By then the post office was closed.

So I sent off the photos in a separate envelope on the very same evening (a friday), with a letter explaining everything. On monday I tried in vain to phone the passport section of the Consulate in Düsseldorf. They don't have a number, and the only option is to phone an office in the UK (irish accent) which bills the phoner's credit card about one euro a minute. If you don't have a credit card, you can't contact anyone, but then again, credit card was the only method of payment for the passport renewal anyway. I wasn't quite ready for that, so I phoned the Embassy in Berlin disregarding the voice message telling me that they don't have anything to do with passports, and I was put through to a very friendly lady (I don't mean that sarcastically) who reassured me that yes I had made a pretty good mess of things, but that Düsseldorf would be sure to get both envelopes, and sort things out. She also said that there was a four week delay in Düsseldorf at the moment because the entire computer system had been replaced three weeks previously.

I found all of this not at all reassuring, but I did have about a month to go, so I decided to wait a couple of weeks before panicking.

Two weeks passed. An email I had written remained unanswered, so I had a good long 13 minute phone call with england from which the only thing I learned was that my passport was definately not being proccessed yet. The time had arrived; I decided to panic and phoned first the British Embassy in Berlin, (friendly, promised to write an email to Düsseldorf) and then the Düsseldorf Consulate's switchboard (in Düsseldorf I never got past the switchboard) who was extremely nervous and rude and hung up on me twice. I assume the switchboard operator was so aggrevated because she gets about five hundred calls like mine a day, and she always has to say no, but hanging up before I had finished talking didn't help anyone.

Then I got an sms telling me I had missed a phone call from Düsseldorf, and when I phoned back, I was stuck with the same nervous operator, who isn't allowed to put me through. That was when my panic climaxed. I had a pretty bad headache that evening, and the next morning until I get another call from Düsseldorf in which a german talking really good english tells me that my passport had been finished and sent off on the previous day.

So that's how I managed to make every possible mistake there was to make, and still got my passport renewed. It was strenuous but worth every minute. I spent my panic time well, mostly with flashbacks of past travel mishaps, but also with some good memories of the first time I flew to New York...

I was eight years old, and it was summertime, and the moment I can remember best of all is when we left the airport at around midnight. The waves of nightime heat, hotter than anything I had ever experienced under Englands sun. And the skyscrapers, and scores of long yellow taxi cabs coming and going. I might as well have landed on the moon.

That's what I hope to experience in kasachstan. Something that goes beyond the ordinary, something that changes my perception of the world. I know its impossible; I've seen too much now. My memory's too full, and my subconsciousness constantly compares the present with the past, but with a new passport in my pocket the least I can do is try.

Kipling knew better

Asia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old.
-Rudyard Kipling

It's pretty, but is it Art? | Kipling

And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart, till the Devil whispered behind the leaves "It's pretty, but is it Art?"
The Conundrum of the Workshops Rudyard Kipling

Google image search results for landart when sorted by red orange yellow and green respectively

I love it when google improves its image search results, especially when my images float up to the top. (Sorting image search results according to their color is only available for google.com, the rest of the world is going to have to wait). vi.sualize.us is the site that helped my images climb in the google results. And vi.sulize.us is still the best place to go if you looking for landart images on the web.

I've linked the screenshots to their relevant search results, which will probable stay similar for a week or longer.

"I think our TV news editors are still sometimes using the language of government propaganda. We still hear the term 'war on terror' for an illegal war. We're still hearing the words reform and modernization when what we really mean is privatization and public greed."

-Ken Loach

"If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy."
-Kurt Vonnegut

Karl Blossfeldt "Wundergarten der Nature"

Karl Blossfeldt is a hero of mine. He was a professor at the "Universität der Künst" here in Charlottenburg about a hundred years ago, and he didn't consider himself an artist or a photographer, but rather took photos of weeds he collected on the outskirts of Berlin to use as subject material in the University.

So he worked for decades teaching students how they could learn about architecture and art just by studying plants, and then Nierendorf, a gallerist from the opposite side of the Hardenbergstraße where he was teaching, went and organized an exhibition for Blossfeldt, who was already 61.

Two years later Blossfeldt's book 'Urformen der Kunst' was published, and he became famous overnight. His second book 'Wundergarten der Nature' was published in 1932, and he died on the ninth of December of the same year.

I admire how unassuming he was. He wasn't interested in becoming recognized for what he had done, he just wanted to take good pictures of plants.

Art that inspires me

Its the details that count. Durer knew it, Rembrant knew it, and so does Claire Scully, of thequietrevolution. Makes me want to draw again.

found through vi.sualize.us

"A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting. "
-Abraham Maslow

My landart has floated to the top of yahoo image search!

This picture of mine was recently 'faved' almost fifty times on http://ffffound.com (here's the link) which resulted in an enormous traffic increase for the original image on flickr, which, in turn, resulted in better ranking for my image in the yahoo image search results for landart. So I am very very pleased with myself, but also a little mystified; why is it that the images that I am most proud of are half as popular as this kind of thing? Don't get me wrong, I like this image, its just that i've done stuff literally ten times as good, but sometimes it would seem as if i'm the only one who thinks so...

What's in a name

I called this blog randomly accesible memories because I often access my own memories in a very haphazard fashion. Mostly through association. The merest wiff of a cologne that's been collecting dust on a shelf for over a decade rockets me onto Cantebury's high street where I bought it on market day lightyears away.

But I don't always know how to get where I really want my thoughts to go.

I have often noticed that unsolvable problems can be best solved by indirect thought.

When I was a child I lived for the moment, and when I thought about my life, which was blessedly seldom, I mostly thought about what lay before me. But the older I get the more I live in memories of the past. And time accelerates like a runnaway train. My memories aren't in folders or lists or any logical order. There might be an index, but I've never seen it. My mind jumps restlessly from one thought to another, randomly accessing my memories.

Experimentation

Everything I do is an experiment. If the picture I make is good or not is of little importance in comparison to what I have learned.

If the experiment 'works' I have the feeling of arrival, of completion, I am finished with the idea. If it doesn't work I often learn far more; it makes me think about why I failed, and often gives me dozens of new ideas.

etsy has promised to start implementing a relevancy algorithm

I like etsy, but there are certain design flaws that make me wonder if etsy's creators have ever heard of usability.

Why do they use flash for statistical data? I have to wait for a whole flash animation to load when i want to see who has 'faved' my shop, and instead of just showing the number of favs next to the view count for my items, i have to click my way through; first to the item's page, and then to the tedious flash animation.

Anyway, they've promised to start using the ranking people give each other's items to help the search relevancy;

"Future phases of Search will include upgrades to the relevancy and ranking of the results. The way current search results are displayed (ranking) is based on chronology (most recently listed items first). We believe that Etsy buyers will be better served by a system that takes into account both ranking and relevance in a way that helps them find items they’re looking for according to various criteria by category. And, for those buyers who may not know what they're looking for, we also hope to introduce later in 2009 tools to foster discovery based on all the hearting and curating that takes place across the Etsy community every day."

Why they didn't use it to begin with will remain a mystery to me, but i hope they make these changes sooner rather than later.

Etsy has too many buying options (i count 15), and none of them work satisfactorily. If only etsy would have an interesting algorithm like flickr, it would work better (and more profitably), and i'd be sellíng more.

Etsy's creators have made some very altruistic statements about helping atists/artisans, and cutting out the dealers ie. connecting consumers directly with makers, but the truth is that if etsy is to succeed (and i hope they will), then they will replace the dealers, and even if they aren't as greedy as ebay or amazon, they will profit by it. So if they want to be good, they should build something that works, not something that just looks like it should work.

Here's a link to my etsy store just to make this more relevant.