Sleep Tangled

Two incidents from the past week:

- Taking my glasses off last night, and somehow managing to jab my finger hard into my eyeball. Kind of baffling (and painfully squishy).

- In a timewarp pub after the gig, drinking hand-pulled Old Stockport beneath a picture of the Queen that had apparently been in situ since the coronation slowly absorbing generations of inebriates’ smoke and booze fumes, getting into a random discussion about Jacques Derrida.

I mention these as they seem somehow to be emblematic of bits of my life, and that’s sort of what I think I need to explain about the new pictures I’ve been putting up here lately.

All these pictures are things that really happened, but I’m trying to use the camera to catch moments that seem to have a symbolic quality. In some cases it can just be that the image suggests a story, of which we’re only seeing a mysterious or even surreal fragment, but I’m generally trying to find something that has a kind of, well, resonance that goes a bit beyond my personal involvement with the situations in the photos.

Given my profound, and very British I suppose, dislike of anything approaching self-aggrandisement or pretentiousness these aren’t things you’ll often hear me say … but I do find myself really visually and emotionally engaged with this new work, quite beyond the underlying intent. Maybe it’s just all squishingly baffling to everyone else though!

The Key

I love this picture - taken through 140 year old glass.

For any Manchester folk: my band at The Castle, Northern Quarter, Weds 16th July. We also - amazingly enough given the difficulty of ever getting us all in the same place at the same time - have gigs lined up in August, September, October and November. Maybe after 10 years we're getting our act together?

Within

Is a dry ice factory really a good place to get some thinking done?

Waiting

White Road

Probably not the most summery picture I could have chosen to post...

Facts are useless in emergencies

This is one of those pictures where you hope it's clear what's going on ... but not too clear.

Talking of things that risk defying explanation, my band seem to have written a song with the working title Steve Vai's Legal High ("Steve Vai" being a general sort of term of abuse we like to use), which joins the Stray Light pantheon alongside the magnificent Peter Falk's False Eye, and the enigmatic Leonard Nimoy Did It. Not currently available at your local record store.

Sort of in honour of this, I'll nominate as my song of the week:

Let's Save Tony Orlando's House, by Yo La Tengo.

Home is where the heart lies

Full of significances only apparent to myself. (I'm quite full of bullshit this evening).

ETA: I was a bit hasty in putting this up - I've just (Sunday evening) replaced it with a better print. I may even take another crack and do so again... Too full of impatience as well as the aforementioned cow cakes.