Monday 10 September 2012

Olympic and Paralympic parade - carnival Monday!

Here she is, queen of England Jessica Ennis with her bling...



It's thirsty work for Jess being so blimmin fit...


And Mr Mo Farah, doing the legendary Mobot.



The Team GB cyclists...


Sir Chris Hoy...


Those horsey lot, including Zara Phillips...


More Team GB track and field athletes, including Christine Ohuruogu...


Here's Iwan Thomas, taking his own pics of the day...


And the GB swimmers...


But this is the bit I really love - office workers hanging out of windows...



People of all ages, out and about with their Union Jacks...



And some wonderful outfits, it has to be said...




Long live the fun of the Olympics and Paralympics - we've loved every minute...

Sunday 2 September 2012

I cried laughing last night...

...thanks to Terry Alderton.

He was doing stand up at the Hackney Empire at a night hosted by Arthur Smith.

Here's 10 minutes of Mr Alderton's refreshing and surreal daftery for all to enjoy....

Tuesday 28 August 2012

Dancing in the street is ALWAYS good

Thank you to all the Kings and Queens of Daftery at Notting Hill Carnival yesterday - here are a few pics of the collective of party people, paraders, police, pranksters and players...god bless you all!

















Friday 17 August 2012

"Playful, eccentric, grotesque, immediate, brilliant: Hirst 1988 - 2012"

In short, I loved it.

Damien Hirst at the Tate Modern. It’s a look back over at his artistic career since the late eighties when he first came to public attention.

This exhibition has been on for a while – I finally got round to going with my sister and my 1 year old nephew. He had a great time too!

I like the directness of his works – in one art critic’s words, “there’s no art bollocks about Damien Hirst.”

There’s his fascination with life cycles, for example, and the fact death will come to us all – sounds gloomy but it’s really not. There’s a whole room in this exhibition with live butterflies flying around - the room has a series of white canvasses on the wall with hundreds of pupae attached to them. It’s as if the butterflies have hatched right out of the paintings on the walls. The butterflies live in this specially humidified and heated room for around a week – and when they die, a Tate Modern staff member told me, they are put in the fridge. The dead butterflies will be recycled by Damien Hirst into another artwork, such as this one….


And there’s Damien Hirst’s “A Thousand Years” – a dead cow’s head, its blood has spilled across the floor. Inside the tank, maggots have hatched into flies. Tens of thousands of flies. They feast and lay their eggs inside the cow’s head. There’s also an Insect-o-cutor inside this tank – will the flies survive in the tank or get sizzled by the zapper? Sounds disgusting and yes it is (there is a trace of the rotting smell as you approach this cabinet) – but it is also fascinating to look at. Life, death, decay. And it’s an uncontrollable artwork, changing before your eyes, every millisecond.



There’s this floating ping pong ball on a hair dryer from his early works whilst at Goldsmiths College in London – daft and funny.


There’s a floating beach ball in the middle of a room with enormous ‘spin paintings’, which were created by Damien Hirst tipping pots of paint from a height on to huge spinning discs. The playfulness of childhood. One of these spin paintings is titled: “Beautiful, childish, expressive, tasteless, not art, over simplistic, throw away, kids’ stuff, lacking in integrity, rotating, nothing but visual candy, celebrating, sensational, inarguably beautiful painting (for over the sofa), 1996”.


There are Hirst’s creatures in formaldehyde vitrines. The sheep. The cow and her calf, sliced in two, “Mother and Child Divided” – you can walk through the middle and study the dissection of this most unusual madonna and child.


There’s the famous shark in formaldehyde – “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living 1991”.


A white dove in flight – with my sister and nephew the other side!


All of Hirst’s creatures are suspended in their vitrines, the surface of which reflects you back as you study their contents. Sometimes the surface of the vitrines curve as you get close up, almost sucking you in. And the world the other side is turned formaldehyde-bluey-green – a reminder of our own life cycle!

Medicine, pathology, pharmacology – all of these themes are explored with humour and directness by Damien Hirst in relation to life and death, in works that are at once very real but also surreal – what’s a life size pharmacy doing in an art gallery, for example? It made me laugh anyway. Hirst says “The Pharmacy” plays with the idea that people put so much faith in medicine but often lack faith in art.

Damien Hirst is on until September 9th at the Tate Modern – definitely worth a visit. (Maybe not if you’re vegetarian!).


Saturday 28 July 2012

Oh Danny Boyle...

...Britain is singing your praises today.

We have to say we LOVED the daftery in your London 2012 Olympic extravaganza.

Mr Bean doing Chariots of Fire...



The Queen dropping in. The farmyard animals. The bouncing on the beds. Voldermort. Mary Poppins gone mad. And the part with the nurses that we don't give a MONKEYS whether the rest of the world understood or not - cos Britain LOVED IT!

So in honour of you, Mr Danny Boyle, here are a three daft film moments we've loved from you...

1) Vacuuming Completely Nude in Paradise

A thousands LOLs to this motivational sales tape scene with Timothy Spall. All you need to know to earn your commission...



2) Slumdog Millionaire - The Train Scene

Fun and colourful, chaotic and quite beautiful - this scene from Danny Boyle's Oscar winner just makes me want to get back to India and take one of those never-ending journeys, where the train is more like a festival (inside the carriages and on the roof!).



3) Trainspotting - The Toilet Scene

Surreal and grotesque and funny - stay away from the drugs kids, this could be where it ends up...

Saturday 21 July 2012

Stoke Newington gets torched...

I popped down Sainsbury's for a can of mushy peas this afternoon and I came across a bloke on a white horse...


...some dancing giants...


...some chicks with colourful feathers...


....some acrobatic types....


...and an OAP with a big flame in her hand.

"Don't do it, old woman," I cried. "It's not worth it."


...but she set fire to a bloke in broad daylight, she did, bold as anything. And everyone cheered her while she did it.


Whatever next, eh?

Of course. A large golden bottom.