Excuses and new beginnings

I feel guilt equivocal to that of a religious person. I know I haven’t updated in over a month which is just evil. However, rather than write short paragraphs about all my real and digital going ons, I’ve been posting them mainly via the twatverse and tumblroom.

‘isalive’ is going to take a newish direction. As I’m now working at an interesting agency and doing work I genuinely enjoy. So, every time something I work on launches I’ll post it up here, (with insider commentary) that way I’ll be more in line with other ‘industry’ bloggers (with a smattering of self promotion and smugitude).

I’ll also include the insights and rants about my new abode, Queen’s Park. After all, life will always be more interesting than advertising, if that changes we should default to Cthulhu.

Booty, as in treasure, not boo-tay

My significant udder and I have recently come into a mass of crockery, cutlery and furniture. No, no one had to die; this was a case of surplus. Like a farmer with a bountiful crop, my friend Craig, now happily married and head of tech at blah blah blah, found that his tenants back in good old LDN were moving on.

‘Oh, what’s this? There are cups everywhere. What’s this? Knives and spoons to spare!’

I should have been in musicals. Anyway, the excess loot is only the setting for our story. The real tale begins with our attempt to get it back to the flat.

For this mammoth task we hired the services of recent St.Martin’s graduate Reuben. Not since Han Solo or Sinbad have you ever met a more charming rogue. He was the captain of a van as battered and bodged at the Millennium Falcon, with another Van’s engine and modified doors to boot. Apart from the credits this artist from the emerald isle would be receiving for his trouble, we throw in a brand new washing machine, Romani style.

Reuben, a man of multiple talents as we would discover, managed to unhook the washing machine from a maze of tentacled pipes, with little effort, all the while talking of waster pipes and other things that someone as genteel as I am ignorant of. Next, we moved the fridge, again Reuben worked a new set of skills, this time disconnecting the live wires, cutting and taping them. Awesome.

The most entertaining part of our adventure came during the journey home. Reuben regaled us with tales of moving furniture and sculptures alike. The best story involved a trip to Hampshire where his van broke down three times. Each time the same A.A mechanic was called out, until, finally, the van gave up the ghost and Reuben had to be towed from Hampshire back to Ireland. A singing endorsement of the A.A if ever there was one.

All this man crush aside, it made me realise that in the here and now, the age, of geeks and metrosexuals, these ‘real world’ skills have been lost. Who can boast, fixing an engine, knowing how to wire a fridge and detach a washing machine without flooding? None of us. We have become like the kryptonians, hiding away behind our talk of social media and the digital age, skin with the consistency of porridge, chasing after the recognition of our contemporaries

And to give this post a nice bit of symmetry, we'll end on a musical:

Hey Ash, whatcha playing?

Zelda

Bioshock

Professor Layton

Smash Brothers Brawl

I have nothing to say

The reason I haven’t posted anything since last week…I honestly have nothing to say. I could talk about the disappointment of returning to Crouch End to find it overrun by BMWs and 4x4 prams helmed by irate mothers. I could also talk about the fascination in watching my significant udder and her recently graduated St Martin’s contemporaries adjusting to careers in art. That last bit sounds like an oxymoron. Or I could talk about my new fondness for Farringdon where I’ve been working for the last few weeks. Or the 50% off Yo Sushi deal that enabled me to gorge on ‘grey plates’ galore last night. Or…

Artverse

To celebrate my significant udders completion of Dante's very own art inferno, we're doing a look back at the past four years worth (actually this blog is barely a year old) of galleries, shows, blockbusters, you name it I probably scoffed at it.

I'm both shocked and awe-somed at the power of persuasion evoked to drag me to all these cathedrals of culture. Good times, good, arty times:

Darren Almond - Fire Under the Snow

Double Agent - ICA

Matthew Barney - Drawing Restraint

Bridge Art Fair 07

Louis Bourgeois and Doris Salcedo

Lynette Wallworth - Hold Vessel 2

Two fringes enter, one fringe leaves

I’m watching Fringe, J.J Abrams latest attempt to mystify. Like all things, there are patterns if you look hard, or should that be, obsessively enough. My girlfriend got a fringe for her degree show, (shameless plug 1 and 2) I don't know why, but that makes it sound like she contracted a disease.

Now, if you regularly viddy this blog you’ll know Abrams and I don’t get on. We fell out over a fiver he never paid back and also his puny attempts to set up a mystery, within a mystery, within…ad infinitum, like a baffling plot version of a Gooducken. I’ll write a 140 character review via twitter here, just to make it more interesting.

No bioengineering, just aging

I feel like Old Snake. I spotted three grey hairs the other day, my vision's deteriorated to the point that I’m now one of those people who holds a menu at arms length and I’ve noticed how noisy Central LDN is. Why do these seemingly innocuous things seem so frightening? I’m 22!

We’re going to do some ‘real time’ blogging here, I'm doing a search for ‘stress related grey hair’ and praying to the Old Gods that once hair goes grey, through trauma or otherwise, it stays that way. Let’s see now…

“While we've all blamed our fading locks on stress, in reality, there is no proven link, said Jeffrey Miller.”

"The process normally begins in one's 30s, but gray hair may become visible as early as one's teens," said Miller.

Oh shit. Well, if I have any talents to my name, its being able to delude myself into thinking that something seemingly negative, can be an outright awesome-wells, positive. Grey Fox, (ties in nicely with the Metal Gear reference I made at the beginning of this post) was an exoskeleton wearing, laser sword wielding, ninja, after all. Excellent, I’ve started already.