Sinister: The Draughtsman's Contract

[gogron]

Dear Sinisterines,

    I write this to you by candlelight. No powercuts, simply for
pleasure. What a release it is not to be working at the moment... to be
living a quiet life away, posting a few letters at the local post
office; digging a tiny spruce out of the patch of woodland in my
parent's back garden and bedecking it with fairy lights; driving to the
store and spending ages chopping vegetables, frying things and now late
afternoon and a winter stew three hours into its gradual melding of
flavours. Actually, it's just turned into a soupy mush, but anyways...

    I've taken some photos of the back of the house, with a view to
designing an extension. The design will be some sort of late extra
present for my parents. Away from the 'let's take the shortest easiest
cheapest way to keep a client happy and get the fees coming in even if
the fees are utterly lousy anyway', I hope to design something that,
even if it doesn't get built, I'm actually proud of, for a change.

    In Glasgow yesterday, I re-visited the exhibition about Scottish Pop
currently running in the city's architecture/design centre, and spent 45
mins watching an old BBC Scotland documentary all about Belle and
Sebastian. It was great seeing the various members of the band in almost
real life. There is this conception that they're twee and geeky, but I
thought they looked and sounded like a perfectly normal bunch of
Glaswegians. Their shyness is nothing unusual here, and I'd say that
together they comprise a wider spectrum of personality types than their
media image would imply.
    There was a thread of cute comic-strip animations describing the
development of the band, which reminded me of the little gif animations
on the sinister website. I was lying in bed awake all night mentally
piecing together how to go about producing such things myself on
paintshop pro... it looks time consuming, if you imagine the number of
frames involved, and requires a different thought process than that for
stills.
    Strangely, when the alarm sounded at 07:15 after no sleep, I
switched it off and almost immediately fell into a semiconcious
dream-state. The dream sequences were so hilarious to me I kept bursting
out laughing, suppressing this only to see another bizarrely comic
sitation, animated, of course. You had to be there, though... the fact
that someone at a supermarket check-out buying 200 boxes of chocolate
cup cakes is only the most funny thing in the world in a certain state
of mind. There was also a bit that was a confusion between a live pop
performance in a little stone-walled basement room with an empty
swimming pool behind the stage, from which the performer had to be
constantly rescued and a raid by the police who find, in an adjoining
basement a single CD beneath a barred window and the concert promotors
throw their heads up in the air chorusing 'not again'. Weird, but so
funny, like the exact opposite of a nightmare.

    Talking of madness, I went to see the new film version (new to the
UK, that is) of Hamlet. 'To be or not to be' is just such a brilliant
and totally meaningful soliloquy. The artsy fartsy language may take a
few minutes to get the hang of if, like me, you're relatively unfamiliar
with Elizabethan English. You'll soon get the gist. It's also fun
spotting both phrases and people that have become part of our everyday
language, such as (I'd say this as an architect manque)[I was about to
quote something along the lines of 'I could live in a nutshell and
proclaim myself a King of infinite space, were it not that I had bad
dreams' but I've searched for over an hour in the text of the play and
can't find it] 'I must be cruel only to be kind' ; 'Get thee to a
nunnery'; Ophelia, floating in the pool as in the famous pre-raphaelite
painting; or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern [are dead: was that not a
broadway play/musical?]. I suppose the rest of you all learn'd this at
school... Makes me enthusiastic, though.

    I'm nae mad, honest!

    Gordon

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