RIP your nana :(

Well I missed death by half a metre in the low viz grey spray on the M62 earlier. Driving back from Kirkby too fast in the rain and some trucker had lost a roll of carpet or cladding or something on the outside lane. i swerved and swore and then shivered, since I'd been imagining something like that happening all morning.

I'd been attempting a conversation with a group of 'at risk' 15 year old boys about health for work, asking them about their town, its violence and the aspects of masculinity that prevent them asking for help. These are the kinds of barriers that need to be overcome says the accepted wisdom, which to me kind of negates acknowledging the need to overcome the conditions necessitating their creation... but still... I didn't get so far with them today; but then why the hell should I... though they did tell me a rasta had been in 'with a big minge' to teach them about sexual health and had stuck his finger in it. I'm assuming it was a model.

Kirkby's an ugly new town built for people displaced by sixties slum clearances. It sits almost in the countryside, cut off from the city by the motorway, like all the pure places. There's an industrial estate, a large plastic-looking grey-green sports centre, a little shopping mall, limited jobs, lots of roads, the youth centre.

Across from poundland, the library has an art gallery; this month's exhibition is by Paul Elliker: innocent-looking technicolour countrysides in flat acrylics. They're based on the utopian landscape designs in kids' text books and mass media, kind of paint-by-numbers looking, or maybe like japanese prints netto-style. Pretty wicked actually, and i've always felt a bit bored by Warhol's tins and marilyns: Elliker says he's responding to the simplification and continual re-packaging of nature, in contrast to the religious symbolism of the traditional romantic landscape. It's all about the surface, the removal of texture in mass culture... nature reduced to a template for people disassociated from it. But the layered geologies looked like tasty animated cocktails to me after the grey gloom of kirkby town centre. And something elemental in the pretty neat reductions... for an instant the pink rivers, blue moons, dark pools and molten eruptions made me think of eternity. Just for a second or two, like in all 'the best disposable pop'... but then maybe i'm still recovering from my near miss. When i looked eternity in the face for an instant a half hour or so later, it looked like a river of sweet pink release :)







oh yeah... i've got new boots too, was well buzzing off clopping round in them x