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Monthly Archive for March, 2007

Anger Management

I just read this on somebody’s Myspace bulletin. It’s great:

When you occasionally have a bad day, and you just need to take it out on someone, don’t take it out on someone you know, take it out on someone you don’t know.

_______________________

I was sitting at my desk when I remembered a phone call I’d forgotten to make. I found the number and dialled it.

A man answered and said “hello’.

I politely said “This is David, could I please speak to Robert Campbell?”.

Suddenly a manic voice yelled out in my ear “Get the right f*king number!” and the phone was slammed down on me. I couldn’t believe that anyone would be so rude.

When I tracked down Robert’s number to call him, I found that I had accidentally transposed the last two digits.

After hanging up with him, I decided to call the “wrong’ number again. The same guy answered the phone and I yelled “you’re a C*nt!” and hung up.

I wrote his number down with the name “C*nt’ next to it, and put it in my desk draw. Every couple of weeks when I was paying bills or had a very bad day, I’d call him up and yell “You’re a C*nt!”

It always cheered me up.

When caller ID was introduced, I thought my therapeutic “C*nt’ calling would have to stop. So, I called his number and said “Hi, this is John Smith from BT. I’m calling to see if you are familiar with are caller ID program?”

He yelled “No’ and slammed the phone down. I quickly called him back and said; “That’s because you’re a c*nt”!

One day soon after I was at lakeside shopping centre getting ready to pull into a parking spot. Some guy in a gunmetal Range Rover cut me off and pulled into the spot I had patiently waited for. I hit the horn and yelled I’d been waiting for that spot but the idiot ignored me.

I noticed a “for sale” sign in his back window, so I wrote down his number. A couple of days later, right after calling the first “C*nt’ (I now had his number on speed dial) I thought I’d better call the Range Rover C*nt too. I said “Is this the man with the gunmetal grey Range Rover for sale?”

“Yes it is” he said.

“Can you tell me where I can see it?” I asked.

“Sure. I live 129 Alice Street in Illford, it’s a terraced house and the car is parked right out in front.”

“Who should I ask for?”

“My name is Steven Hansen” he said.

“When’s a good time to catch you, Steve”?

“I’m at home most days as I’m currently unemployed”.

“Listen Steve can I tell you something?”

“Yes?”

“Steve you’re a C*nt”! Then I hung up and added him to my speed dial too.

Now when I had a problem I had two arseholes to call.

I had an idea.

I called C*nt # 1

“Hello, You’re a C*nt!” (I didn’t hang up)

“Are you still there” ? he asked

“Yea” I said.

“Stop calling me” he screamed.

“Make me”, I said.

“Who are you” he asked.

“My name is Steve Hansen”

“Yeah where do you live”.

“C*nt I live at 129 Alice Street Illford, a terraced house, with my gunmetal Range Rover parked in front.”

He said “I’m coming over right now, Steve. And you better start saying your prayers”.

I said “Yeah like I’m really scared C*nt” and hung up.

Then I called C*nt # 2, “Hello” he said.

“Hello C*nt” I said.

He yelled “If I ever find out who you are”

“You’ll what?” I said.

“I’ll kick your arse” he exclaimed.

I answered “Well C*nt here’s your chance I’m coming over right now”.

Then I hung up and immediately called the Police, saying that I lived at 129 Alice Street, Ilford and that I was on my way home to kill my gay lover. Then I called Channel Five news about a hoodie war going down in Alice Street, Ilford.

I quickly got into my car and headed over to Alice street. I got there just in time to see two C*nts beating the crap out of each other in front of six Police cars, an overhead police helicopter and a news crew.

Now I feel much better; anger management really does work.

Procissão de Todos os Santos 2006

It’s not often that I stumble upon a Flickr user’s stream who’s photos really grab me, and it’s even less often that I “favourite” one, let alone several, of another user’s photos, but Penoni’s set Procissão de Todos os Santos 2006 is absolutely incredible! The combination of flash-light with Southern hemisphere twilight, and frozen stiltwalkers with blurred, zoomed and panned backgrounds, produces magical realism at its most lyrical and strange.

Dancing your life away

Raymond Sumption, 94, is proof that women like a good dancer… Sumption’s attitude is that “If you find fault with everything, you can be an old man at 40.

Way to go, Sumption!

Women and Abu Ghraib

Bee Flowers’ new exhibition Liberation - Women and Abu Ghraib is simultaneously beautiful, shocking, funny, wonderful, terrifying, thought-provoking and incredibly insightful, everything that good art should be.

My, how quickly they grow

Last night I commented on how Rowan is nearly as tall as Gill (there’s about 2 inches, perhaps slightly less, in it).

This morning I got a phone call from Gill. She was going into town with Rowan, and the bus driver refused to let them on without paying full fare, because Rowan doesn’t have a pass proving that she’s under 16. I know she is tall, and was dressed quite stylishly above her age today, but even so - she’s 11, FFS, still in Junior school!

Of course, the bus driver didn’t stop her from getting on because she looked over 16. He stopped her because she looked 13, and 13 year-olds have to have a pass proving that they’re not yet 16. What a crazy bureaucratic world we live in! Of course, this now means that 11 year-olds ought to carry a pass to prove that they’re not yet 13, and so on until before long we’ll have babies carrying documents to prove that they’re not OAPs.

Vice Live Tour photos

Thinking of Vice

I’ve put a small set of photos online from the Vice gig last night, using my new off-camera flash setup.

I hope to make a larger set, and upload it to my personal website, at some point in the future. But I probably won’t. I’m lazy like that/too busy. I seem to be increasingly using Flickr to get photos online quickly and easily (and also so that I can get some comments on them, which is always nice). It’s just… so easy!

Improvised off-camera flash technique

Improvised off-camera flash technique

This is an idea which has been bubbling in my head since the weekend, when I spent half the night trying to hold together my flash and radio receiver, and the other half nursing tempremental electrical contacts, before finally bumping into somebody, smashing the receiver and losing the battery.

I have taped up the receiver so that it’s fairly secure, taped it onto the flash head so that the two don’t keep coming apart, and - most important of all - I have stolen a small piece of sparkly fishnet tights from Rowan, slipped it over my arm, and stuffed the flash inside. This means that I have a fully operational off-camera flash at arms length from me, while my non-camera hand remains free for vital tasks such as carrying beer. Sorted!

Tonight I’m off to the Vice student gig at Plug to test it all out. No doubt something will break, again, but hopefully my ingenuity will find a way around it.

I also got one of these to pack my kit in. It’s a bit bigger than I’d imagined, but really rather swish, and incredibly practical (well, I hope it is. The proof is always in the pudding…)

Teaching Photography

Tonight I taught my first photography workshop in Wath-on-Dearne. I had been dreading it - was on the verge of panic attacks last night - but actually it went very smoothly, the kids were wonderful (there were only 4 of them - I had been prepared for 2 or 3 times that number) and everyone had a good time. It’s been a massive confidence boost to me, managing to get this under my belt.

We started the session with a quick slide-show of about a dozen of my photos, then I showed them in about 30 pictures from the National Portrait Gallery Photographic Portrait Prize over the last four years. I got them to to talk in detail about each picture - what it told them about the person pictured, and how different things like the background, clothing, possessions, pose, framing, angle, lighting etc. could all affect our understanding of the person shown, and could add up to a story about that person.

Then I got them to split into two groups of two, and take photos of one another, thinking about some of those different elements and how they could be used. I just let them use the cameras on fully automatic settings, with flash (although a couple of them worked out how to turn the flash off).

Then I mixed up the groups, and gave each group two halogen desk lamps to play with, switched off the main lights and got them to play with lighting.

Finally, we downloaded the photos and looked at them.

I’m really looking forward to next week now! And on Sunday, I’m giving another workshop to a local Muslim girls’ group.

Several more photography commissions rolling in - I’ve got a conference to do on Friday, and it looks like I’ll have another party to do next week. Suddenly, all systems are go!

Ponderosa

I am working on a new set of photos, taken in Sheffield’s Ponderosa park. Photos are online at Flickr. Here’s a description of my thinking behind this set:

Two years ago, my friend Hugh was attacked from behind while talking on his mobile phone, late at night on Commonside.

Several months later, I found a mobile lying on the pavement close to my house. I could tell it belonged to a student (there was a message on the screen from one of the candidates taking part in the Sheffield University Student Union Elections, reminding the owner to vote). I assumed it had dropped out of his pocket during a night of drunken over-indulgence. So I searched the contacts for “mum”, and phoned her, only to be told that she was sitting in hospital next to the phone’s owner. When his girlfriend came to collect it the next day, I asked whether he was OK. In obvious distress she said “No, he’s not. He has blood on his brain. He was punched just down the road from here, fell down and hit his head on a metal grate”.

I was deeply affected by this fleeting contact with somebody else’s life.

When subsequently I found an open rucksack and a lunchbox, under a tree in the Ponderosa, I was certain that it was the discarded side-effects of another mugging. I took it to the police station, hoping it might provide some evidence. The desk clerks seemed to think the fact that I’d bothered to take it in was faintly ridiculous.

Soon after that, in exactly the same spot, I was savaged by a police dog which was being used to sniff out a stolen purse.

This accumulation of incidents showed me a different side to this pleasant student neighbourhood. The peace and seclusion of the Ponderosa, the tranquil moments I enjoy there when walking the dog, are also ideal for muggers who go there at night to divvy up their loot after jumping on drunken students or rifling through their houses. Dealing with the police had left me feeling powerless and ineffective, so instead I started to photograph the detritus, evidence, discarded and unwanted traces of night-time crime.

Technically, these pictures differ from many of my others because they are shot with a point-and-shoot camera, and not edited in any way (normally I will make some adjustments to contrast and sharpness, as well as often cropping photos, before uploading them). They are also uploaded at original camera resolution. What they have in common with the majority of my photos is that they are taken direcly as they are seen “in the wild”, nothing is posed or re-arranged to the camera.

Got Cum?

Warning! Not Safe For Anywhere. Hilarious though.