glasgow shitty council (again)

So, the council leader Stephen Purcell takes cocaine, video is taken
of him doing it and in a panic he tells his fellow councillors. Who do
nothing. In fact, they tell him it is OK.
The police get involved and end up pressing charges on the grounds of
fraud, those backhanders for contracts which every single inhabitant
of this dump knows are paid out.
Then they drop the charges.
Remind me why I pay council tax... Is it so that some fat degenerate
can snort it up his nose? Perhaps it is used to pay off corrupt police
officers? Maybe it is so that all the councillors can snort it up
their noses whenever they don't have them firmly entrenched in the
trough of self-indulgence?

glasgow is run by a corrupt, stinking bunch self-interested idiots and
losers. It is no wonder that the city is one of the most foul in
Europe.

Link, in case you think I am making this up: BBC report.

don't forget...

That glasgow is a shit-heap full of violent scum.
I was woken up this morning at 6am by the sounds of an attempted murder outside my house. A cheap ned slag with a huge kitchen knife attempting to stab one of two sportswear-clad inbreeds. I only wish she had succeeded in reducing the ned gene-pool but sadly the police stopped her.

theatre of glass

My friend Jeff in Edinburgh has just posted some pictures of his latest and most startling work, toy theatres made in glass:




Click on the photograph to go to his website. You can see more of his work on his website which is linked on the left.

protest!

I, like all right-thinking people, think that it is unacceptable for an ex-member of Hitler Youth to be invited on a state visit to Britain. Especially someone who has been actively involved in covering up child-abuse, who says it is OK to deny the Holocaust and who opposes scientific research. That is why I signed the petition asking the government to dissociate themselves from the visit of pope Ratzinger to the UK.

You should too, at the Number 10 website.

weekend

What a weekend! I had great fun in Birmingham, which is a place I love - with my usual contrary nature: most people have a terrible and unfair opinion of what has got to be Britain's only truly multi-cultural city. (Yes, more than London.)

Went down on Friday, to meet with James and to hear a performance of Stockhausen's Carré, a spatial piece for four orchestras and choirs which was performed in the incredible venue of the Methodist Central Halls (AKA "Q-Club"), a crumbling Victorian brick methodist church, very wrecked and very beautiful. The music was excellent and the other pieces on the programme were Allegri's Miserere, Tallis' Spem in Alium and Berio's Laborintus II. The Berio piece is one with which I am familiar from recordings: this was a proper performance, complete with actors, dancers and video projections which made it particularly exciting.









On Saturday, I spent the day with Sophie, being highly cultured and visiting the Bridget Riley retrospective and the Staffordshire Hoard - delighted to hear that it will now be staying in the Midlands and will not be going to London - wandering round the art gallery and museum and going to the Rag Market, which is a brilliant kind of market where you can buy anything from buttons to tweed jackets. Bought an old waxed cotton trench coat which smells funny, though I didn't notice that until it was hanging up in the hotel room...

(The hotel was SO noisy, the Ibis hotel in Chinatown. Directly above some nightclubs. The place was clean and efficient, polite and friendly, but even after moving to three different rooms, the noise of the clubs below was unbearable. Not helped by the cheap Liverpudlian hoor who hammered on my door at 5am in a drunken stupor and who just shrieked and ran away when I growled at her!)

Met up with James in the evening and went for dinner and a drink but as he was working at 7am on Sunday, it was an early night.

Sunday was all about taking photographs - on Flickr now - and then home to worry about the degree validation (see previous post).

Not much to report today. I have washed the coat and have re-waxed part of it and it smells much better!

Degree!

North Glasgow College now offers a degree in Jewellery Design and Technology, the first skills-based practical degree in jewellery in the UK! We got permission from the validating body (Leeds University) yesterday to run it starting in the autumn of this year. Excitement!!!

what a week... and it is only wednesday

Loads of things going on at work at the moment and I'm really busy at the bench.
Completed a few pieces which have been on the go, including this brooch, La Bellezza della Lotta, inspired by Marinetti:





My Carl Sagan tribute piece, Contact:





Which I have been invited to submit to the Celebrating Sagan website.

In addition, I got some more professional shots taken of the last pieces I finished:









Off to Birmingham this weekend for a concert, to see friends and to RELAX!

Cocktail Rings Revisited

Cocktail Rings Revisited
Originally uploaded by the justified sinner

My second publication, the new Lark Books, "500 Gemstone Jewels". It came out earlier this week but I was too busy to get round to post this.

scarifying day

I got up this morning having decided to go to Ayr to take some photographs by the seaside. I got to the station and asked for a ticket to Ayr...

"It'll take you two hours to get to Ayr" (the exact words of the ticket-office attendant)
"Oh. Why two hours?"
"Bus"

Well, it got the information across, even if it did lack in the customer service niceties. So I went for a walk around glasgow instead, deciding to go over to the south side as I've not been there for ages.

My photography was interrupted four times. I was once told to "Fuck off, away from ma hoose" when photographing a fence; that I "Canny take photos here" when standing on a public pavement and photographing inside a warehouse - the idiot in the jacket printed with the word "security" (to make him feel better about being a menial drone with no self-respect and an IQ of about 74) then proceeded to attempt to prevent me from taking the photograph by moving menacingly towards me on the public pavement; two neds in a souped-up car threatened me with violence and threatened to steal my camera for photographing a statue in an industrial estate - they only left when I took out my mobile and told them that I was calling the police. The final act of this four-act tradgedy actually involves the police. I took a photograph of a building site. The next thing I knew, a police van swerved up to the kerb next to me, lights flashing, asking to know what I was doing. I told them that I was taking photographs. "What of" the officer asked. Now, I know that I don't actually have to answer that question, but I am not an idiot, so I told him, "Some rusty grilles on the other side of that wall". It seems that another security moron had telephoned them and told them that I had been trespassing. You might have thought that these security drones might at least have some training in the basics of the law: it is NOT trespassing to stand on a public road and look over a wall and take a photograph.

After all that, I needed a coffee and went into the glasshouse cafe in Queens Park. This is a great place. Well, it used to be a great place. This experience was actually WAY more scarifying than the incidents described above...





The place was absolutely full of young parents and children. Every last one of them white, well-dressed, middle-class and every last one of them dressing their children to look exactly like themselves. Tiny rugby shirts. Miniature Laura Ashley dresses. Children - their names all ending in "-ie" (Robbie, Christie, Martie, Carrie...) - being forced into the failure-shaped hole of their parents' desires. "Yummy mummy" and her equal-ops partner allowing their offspring to develop in the most liberal of ways so long as those are the right liberal ways. Breeding children to have the life that they wish that they could have had themselves, aspirational offspring.

Actual snippets of conversation overheard: "She's letting me away for a night in London, I can't wait really..."; "I didn't want to have a caesarian section but the head had..."; "We're only giving her white meat once a week, the rest of the time she's vegetarian..."; "It's that art-school thing. You kind of lose it..."; "Robbie can get through some of the grade one exercises..." (Robbie was about 2 years old and, don't misunderstand, if Robbie got through those because he wanted to get through them you won't hear a word of complaint from me, but if he was forced to get through them, that is a different story. Quite another issue is that of the bragging of the parents.)

I'm going to stop now as there are flecks of spit forming at the corner of my mouth!

craftspeople arise!

Let the V&A know what you think about CRAFT and what it means to you:

What does craft mean to you?

two flatteries in one day

Not only did I receive an email this morning from a student in Australia who was studying my work in her art class, but I now find that I'm featured in Lora Hart's blog.