HEAD HELD DOWN Negativity isn’t a perception of a world outside, it’s a projection of that world inside: how you feel about yourself, as you continually manoeuvre the inner furniture, trying to feel at home. This reminder gives you rest-bite from the habit of being hard on yourself. But it splutters and withers as youContinue reading “A Uk bank holiday in 2024”
Category Archives: writing
My secret love of rocks
Like many kids who have been allowed the space to be interested in things, I had fleeting fixations. Having initially been WW2 obsessed, collecting and subsequently breaking Airfix models, I went on to be obsessed with snakes, fossils, and trees. When I started secondary school in 1995 I came to the conclusion that the onlyContinue reading “My secret love of rocks”
The mistaken belief that pain will end: Blur’s ’13’, 25 years on
To speak with admiration of Blur still stokes fear of criticism, even to this day. I’ve read enough critiques of their class tourism in the 90s; the ease with which they simultaneously pantomimed the working class whilst being socialites in the Camden scene to make me feel like the only culture I’m allowed to talkContinue reading “The mistaken belief that pain will end: Blur’s ’13’, 25 years on”
Re-reading Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s ‘cognitarian subjectivation’ 13 years later.
Around the time of all the stuff kicking off in 2011, the student protests, the English Riots and the Occupy movement, a friend, noticing that I was projecting slightly more nervous energy than usual, suggested an article by a writer I’d never heard of. I’d only started reading in my mid 20s. After the financialContinue reading “Re-reading Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s ‘cognitarian subjectivation’ 13 years later.”
The ascent (Black Hill)
Where do you go when the direction, momentum, you indirectly, but nonetheless wholeheartedly placed your future state of being within, dissolves into thin air, and you see nothing in front of you? You go sideways. Westwards. Up here…scouring for answers. The moors are plural. One moor is every moor. But the Moors is a stateContinue reading “The ascent (Black Hill)”
“When we awoke it was spring”
The above line is taken from the film ‘London’ by Patrick Keiller. Spring means more to me than I realise, if I’m foolish enough to let it slip me by. I see it specifically in the former mining areas of South and West Yorkshire, the rolling fields that still separate the sporadic built-up areas, alwaysContinue reading ““When we awoke it was spring””
Historicide/”Who made the monster?”
I admit this new drawing isn’t a cause for personal celebration. It’s a completion of a series of works spanning the last few years, that I wish to see the end of now, begging for a closure of a wound through which the works have spoken. I once thought this was just self-dislike, but it’sContinue reading “Historicide/”Who made the monster?””
YSP: a requiem for a dream
Yorkshire Sculpture Park: the citizen’s park that never was The following views are about an insider, albeit of no particular significance to the organisation, who wasn’t disgruntled, but who lamented and mused from the gallery benches over what this place could have been. I spoke recently to a friend about how travelling by a cityContinue reading “YSP: a requiem for a dream”
Near desert…
Langsett remains weird. An intrusion of the outside. Dream-like, in that all our dreams are breached by that which shouldn’t be there. Nor should I… be here, ‘down there’. I’m lost. That horizon line that greats you as you ascend the first set of hills, with its weirdly rhythmical monotony, calls you forward… Yet itContinue reading “Near desert…”
Only in absence
During the course of my life I’ve realised that I can only reach out and embrace something’s presence/my presence in its total absence. An inability to be at ease with the living, to do what the living do, as led me to be a living ghost, who in turn chases other ghosts. I’ve developed aContinue reading “Only in absence”
John B Ledger 