allan

Word to the wise: from a photograpically demented standpoint, skip the big , impressive museums and beeline for the oddest, the smallest and most out of the way antiquity joints available.  Kristan Morrison took us along a Glasgow byway to the transport museum, a daft warehouse full of disused tramcars and plastic horses, as well as the immaculate facades of a high street from the 1920s, complete with cars and window displays.  I could make long and handy stories using these as a backdrop.

spent the afternoon roaming around a small museum within the British library, containing among other things, the original magna carta.  It is emboldening to see a handwritten poem by Sylvia Plath and others, literary immortals that in fact, crossed out whole lines of their poems, adding and eradicating words throughout.  We were all once only human, deified by the printing press and, ultimately, the spell check.

I woke in the child’s room that my lover had grown in, hidden in a ring of books and faeries.  And crept down to breakfast, the sky through the window hanging low and grey, like a funeral veil.  I remember what it was about her, beyond her obvious beauty, that drew and turned me.  Grace of movement.  She moves like that only when no ones looking, or when it’s dark.

I’d planned and wrought a more ambitious project using Manuel’s creations, but did this test shoot first, just to prove its impossible for the armor or these models to ever look bad.

19th-This trip is shaking pieces off me, moving the inert dust.  Not a massive upheaval, but something subtle, like a process or meditation.  And I want to help it, this chemistry, I want to limber up the bones and brain  beneath the dust, and soften the soil for the plough.  Did someone put a canoe in my trousers?

Don’t go to provins with luggage, all hills and cobblestones, no lockers in the station.  But it does boast a thousand year history, protected by a great network of battlements you can actually explore unsupervised.  As in you can jump on them!  And climb and hurdle, not that I did, I was respectful.