Sinister: 2 cups black treacle; 12oz (300g) bulgur wheat; an airport

[figure2 at xxx.net]

In the volume house building business, each site is a development of lots of houses arranged with a casual artiness along curvilinear roadways and cul-de-sacs, the latter being from the French: say, a vessel closed at one end; a wee suburban balloon. In order to satisfy the local authorities that our proposals are thoroughly in line with expected mediocrity: in order for us to mutter a queazy agreement about it all, we produce 'street scenes'. I have computer design files of various elevations of houses designed a long time ago in London but given local names, say, 'Ravelston', 'Dunedin', 'Crail', Leven', 'Kinghorn' etc. With the aid of text files listing plot numbers and an overall plan and coloured pencils and scribbles I can calculate that, say, plot 147 is a 'Ravelston' with grey tiles and red bricks and plot 148 is a 'Kinghorn' with different tiles and different bricks and perhaps quoins (corner stones) in a contrasting texture or colour. How pretty. Anyway, the exercise of producing the 'street scenes' I desire to make hot-house fast, to stave off the boredom, so I'm rattling around the copy and paste and scale and orthogonal snap functions whispering the cache memory of my own brain which reads 'Dun Rav Lev (A) Rav Lev (B... different tiles and bricks to (A)) Dun Kin Duncan Drookit Docket...' celebrating the plot 363 edge of phases three and two by adding a flagpole and decorative extras to the built-in garage of a 'Ravelston' which I draw on a layer that I will later freeze, so as nobody else will see it. Angels, flying donkeys and 3m thick insulation can be added, as appropriate, after a similar fashion.

So that's the day.

At the train station, the train is always late but, if it arrives and it's not a juddering cattle truck, one is grateful. There are lots of people on the platform waiting to rush into its confines, and the canny ones stand staring at the shit and toilet paper on the tracks because shit = toilets= end of carriage= doors into carriage= possibility of a seat, even a seat by the window. Even if, by this time, it is long since dark. One can stare at one's reflection in silhouette, which has the charming effect of removing one's complexional problematics and thus constitutes a boost to the ego along with the having been canny and got a seat in the first place. Time to read the 'jobs vacant' section of two or three newspapers or, if one is lucky, someone has left a tabloid full of gossip and horoscopes.

I'm trying to think of a short-cut to the internal attitude of your average aristocrat. In the name of democracy, of course. I was watching Raoul Ruiz's 'Time Regained', based on the final volume of the Proust trilogy and hailed as 'A cine-literary miracle' by the Evening Standard. I was chatting about this in sini to some Proust experts (I digress here) who, quite plausibly suggested that cinema and Proust couldn't profit from a connection. My contention is that this particular film is highly unusual as it leaves a great deal in the gaps and overloads the content with multiple layers. For example, the narrator frequently appears in both younger and older guises simultaneously in the shot, whilst maintaining seperate spaces, and the shift from reportage to surrealism is more deft than leaping. 
Returning to my psychological parlour games, it was a scene in the above film that got me thinking. Aristocrats are rather sure of themselves, mainly because they are infused with a palpable sense of lineage. Ignoring, for a moment, that this lineage is also conceived as being superior to that of the 'common herd' one can take the basic fact that here are people who sit, on a daily basis and at leisure, surrounded by rather large pictures of their grannies, dads, uncles, deceased dogs and horses owned by great-grandfathers and so on, in a big room. In this very straightforward circumstance they have both the challenge to live up to the expectations of their phantom imaginations and therein also form the character of difference to those who do not share the noses, gazes and landscape settings of these guys set up in oil paint. John Berger who, I think, is married to Isabel Allende who, I think further, is the daughter of an ex-president of Argentina, wrote in his 'Ways of Seeing' that most conventional portraiture was a means of describing property... a sort of pictogrammic inventory, if you like. Witness all these stray guns, plates, skulls, fields, mirrors in a pre-20th century portrait.
Just a thought.

The sinister crowd are a mobile bunch, huh? Seemingly some folks are moving to Scotland, there seems to be a Greek exchange thing going on and New York gets lots of visitors. Which kind of leaves San Fran, Brazil, Norway, Poland and Singapore out a bit, to name some almost random places. I was once a player in organising international meet-ups of architecture students... I'm getting wanderlust. Maybe it's all the talk of settling: my mortgage and garden speculations, that did it.
What about 500 of us, from all over the world, camping in a circus big top for a week? We could do some useful community project, say, and invite belle and seb to take part in the evening revelries.
Mmm... just another thought. But one that I've seen happen before, so it's possible. The big top was in Belgium. I'll send you pictures if you want.

Gordon

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