the parish records

Hidden in Plain Sight

Walk into a room. In a glass case ontop of a waist high plinth, 3 standard stoppages. Duchamp's acknowledged favourite work. 3 meter length tailors thread attatched to a very thin piece of canvas painted carbon copy paper blue. Beautifull wodden guides duplicate the bezier like curve's made by the thread. Plaque on wall takes Duchamps word for it and tells us he dropped the meter threads from a meter height and then fixed them to the canvas. Canned Chance. Experiment years later in which john cage tried unsussesfully to duplicate the action. No matter how many times, the thread never landed with the gentle curves that Duchamps threads display. Closer inspection. Threads are sewn through two points on canvas. 3 x 2 xy coordinates in total. Canvas strips are glued onto pieces of glass. I am thinking about time and space. Did Duchamp have a some kind of string theory? Canned laughter? Looking from the side, close up to the glass, it is unbelievable, the colour, it's like a mediterainian blue, i mean its really pure, refreshing, maybe it's more like a sheet of ice in the antartic, or one of those ice cores. Skip to wikipedia. a snippet from their deffinition: "The composition of these ice cores, especially the presence of hydrogen and oxygen isotopes, provides a picture of the climate at the time" more canned laughter!!! Moving around the display case with my face pressed up against the glass I start to attract attention, especially as I seem to have noticed "something" and am taking notes. Other people come up to the display case, take a minute, then bend their knees and look at the stoppages from the same angle. Another person is also taking notes, looking from different angles. A turn around to see a small child laying down on the gallery floor, it's mother says "your tired now arent you" as she picks her up and plonks her into a push chair. The chair just so happens to be at the right height for the child to get a great view of the three standard stoppages. After a breif moment of contemplation the child says "that's nice"

On and Off Kerrrouac and McCarthey

When asked if he understood James Joyce's writing, the composer John Cage said that he enjoyed Joyce precisely because he didn't understand it. He added “I enjoy Joyce, I am an enjoycer”!!
I think it was Abbas kiarostami the Iranian film director who once said he preferred films that sent him to sleep in the cinema but that woke him up once he got outside. I like this idea, that a film or a book creates a kind of dream state that we can inhabit when we experience it and then starts working on us when we leave or finish it.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy sent me to sleep. After I had woken up, It started working. For days and months it has been sitting there, somewhere in the back of my brain, quietly, working. But working at what? I have no idea.
When I think of the Road, a split second before I do, I sometimes insert the word On in front, so that The Road becomes On the road, and now I am thinking of Kerouac.