The magic alphabet, the mysterious hieroglyph, come to us only in an incomplete and garbled form, garbled either by the passage of time or by those with a vested interest in our ignorance; should we retrieve the letter which has been lost or the sign which has been effaced, should we reconstruct the dissonant scale, we shall regain our authority in the world of the mind.

GERARD DE NERVAL

We suffocate beneath the yarns
Home-spun wrongs from simple spindles
Drapery for the frontal lobe of man

The design of contemporary film posters tends to be driven by the assumption that potential audiences favour the bland. Photographic-montage portraits of the major stars dominate the field, with backgrounds reserved for the indication of genre. A bunch of heads placed against a feathered, swirling setting usually denotes fantasy, but the same set of mug-shots put in a frame of plain white space could be a sign of a Stiller-esque caper. Promoting uniform experiences dressed up in so many ways, these images sell commercial film at its worst.
From the mid-1950s to late 1960s, illustrated posters and handpainted hoardings, by contrast - although often the products of pure economics - added a dimension that is missing from most of today's cinema advertising.

Posters above -

Rancho Texas - Jerzy Flisak
Someone to Watch over me - Andrzej Pagowski
Le Petit Soldat-Der Soldat (Jean Luc Godard) - Jan Lenica
Polish and Czech film posters have a long history of using hand-crafted images as a means of cultural emphasis. Foreign film screenings were relatively rare and needed no advertisement, so, from the state’s point of view, rather than being promotional images, these posters were intended to recast film scenarios in symbolic, often abstract terms, rendering them appropriate for a socialist audience.

The astounding She Monster - artist?
Throughout the hey-day of B movies, an illustrated, or painterly style was the norm.

Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock) - Saul Bass
Arguably the very best proponent of the graphic style for Western audiences was Saul Bass, who over the course of 30 years, created some of the most iconic movie posters of all time - Vertigo, Psycho, and The Man with the Golden Arm, amongst them. His most successful movie partnerships included those with Alfred Hitchcock, and Otto Preminger – Preminger in fact was famed for the vigilance with which he policed cinemas, making sure they promoted his films with the authorized Saul Bass-designed symbols rather than snatched images of their stars.

Baiju Bawrai - artist?
The very last outpost of the illustrated film poster was Bollywood, but unfortunately, even there, the traditional painted image has begun giving way to photography. India's taste in film may remain local, but their graphic taste seems to be veering in a global direction.

For my desert dwelling comatose friend and his bloodied cat...?

MESCALINE, PEYOTE AND THE LAW
Both mescaline and Peyote are illegal under the statutes of the [U.S.] Federal Government and most States. Members of the Native American Church are permitted the ritual use of peyote because they established it as a religious sacrement long before these laws came into existence. Members are not permitted to use mescaline, however. Several other cacti such as San Pedro also contain mescaline. Technically it would be illegal to possess these, but because they are common ornamental plants it is permissable to use these cacti for normal horticultural purposes. If a person should attempt to use any of these plants for a psychedelic experience, prosecution is possible. If he were to extract the mescaline from these, the alkaloid would definitely be contraband material. It is important that this point be made clear because the mescaline extraction process is given in this guide. To extract the alkaloids from Doñana and other non-mescaline bearing cacti is not illegal. The information in this guide is presented for the sake of furthering knowledge. The Author can assume no responsibility for how anyone may apply it.

An excellent spot of blending....

N is for Neville who died of ennui.

In capitalism, slowness is either expensive and a privilege - relaxation, bought with inherited or earned wealth - or free and a stigma: the dawdling days of the elderly and the unemployed. The difficult task then is to understand slowness not as an obstacle to production but as a valuable mode of perception in its own right. If the mantra directed towards children used to be 'behave!' now it seems to be 'hurry up!' Although this represents a sort of progress - at least it shifts the attention from sitting up straight to engaging in the everyday buzz around you - it negates what little kids have a real sense for: those suspended moments in time when, for example, they stop to marvel at a bug for minutes at a time. Artists, like kids, for centuries have resisted the demand to behave. Now they can play up their efficiency at resisting the demand to hurry up.

Not to be confused with – indolence, insouciance, torpidity or neglectfulness.

Shenjia Alley - Fairy
Yang Fudong b.1971, Beijing. Lives and works in Shanghai

Art is definitely not my profession, but it has become an integral part of my life. It’s like going to sleep every night and dreaming. It's something that is always going to happen, something that ends and then begins again. It’s like when you wake up in the morning knowing that you had a dream last night, but you cannot recall what it was that you dreamed. Still, a feeling lingers in the back of your mind that you had a strange or even frightening dream last night. You know if you try to tell the dream to someone else, they just won’t be able to relate. So you can only keep it inside you.You live in a big city, hiding in your little corner, and it’s doubtful that even a few people know of your existence. Yet you are a part of the city. It's you and a lot of other such people that make up this city. The feeling of the city depends on all of these people living in their own dreams. My relationship with society to a large degree is a kind of metabolic relationship. Society needs ever-changing relationships, just like those that are occurring today. I too am ever-changing. I was unable to choose which generation I was born into, yet I have to learn to adapt to the times. — Yang Fudong

Let's
take a hole and fill it
Let's
bury them with lye

Let's
burn their homes
down to the ground
and watch their children die

Let's
raze their hopes and memories
Lets
hang their dreams to dry

Let's
make a wasteland of their birth
then boast instead of cry

Intellectual whimsy is a widely shared attitude, at least among a certain segment of youngish writers and creative types. It is, as Susan Sontag once wrote of camp, a common sensibility, a brand of taste that unites those who have it against the norm. If, in Sontag's words, ''the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural', the essence of whimsy is its flirtation with the insignificant and random. Flirtation, though, not love, because unlike, say, Dada, whimsy triumphs when the import of the apparently insignificant and the relevance of the random are discovered.

With thanks to Charlotte Taylor

A pogonophobe
And optophobe
Ran naked and blind
Into a phasmophobe
They blushed then saw
An ereuthophobe
And thought better of their shame

"A Conservative government is an organised hypocrisy."

Benjamin Disraeli, Mar. 1845

Chance the half-wit gardener says - "What Rot!"

Charters and other contracts of the realm provide the most important primary records for genealogical research in the landed families in Scotland in the early 13th century. The privilege of being a witness to important royal agreements and documents, was reserved only to bishops, tenants-in-chief (of the monarch) and the nobility. Jack Richard Blair could find only five instances in the time frame of 1204 to 1211 in which de Blair's (de Blare's) were associated with contracts of the realm. These included two charters concerning the town of Irvine in Ayrshire in 1205, one witnessed by two William de Blares (father and son) and the other witnessed by Alexander de Blare and Bryce de Blare. Stephen de Blare was witness on another charter. Some of these de Blares were of the Barony of Blair in Ayrshire. However, Jack Blair's research indicates that Stephen de Blare owned lands in Blair in Gowrie and granted part of these to the Abbey of Coupar Angus Blare about 1190 - 1200, was witness to another charter of Coupar Angus Blare about 1200 and also a charter of Arbroath Abbey in the above mentioned period 1204 - 1211. He identifies an Alexander de Blair who witnessed a charter of Brechin Blare Cathedral before 1214 and who married around that time to Ela daughter to Hugh de Nyden whose lands were close to St.Andrews, Fife. Hugh de Nyden was also associated with charters of Coupar Angus Blare Abbey. Alexander de Blair also received a grant of lands in the Scottish Highlands about 1225 from the Prior of St.Andrews, this perhaps being the lands of Blacklunnan, north of Blairgowrie and at the foot of Mount Blair. The lands of Blacklunnan were held for many generations by the Blairs of Balthayock lairds. It seems probable that there were at least two persons named Alexander de Blair in the early 1200s, one in Ayrshire in the west of Scotland and another strongly associated with the Angus, Perthshire, Fife area in the east of Scotland.

...mind is wandering...

Inhuman, vestigial years.
A wicked stink.
Clotted rot for clots and rotters.
Now ask me how I wend my way? Now ask me how I fill my days?
Wasting time with whinging rhymes, cooking crimes, and earning dimes.
Just another rotted clot. A beastly bruise on boxed in land.
Pick me up and poke me under.
Take a spoon and scrape the sockets.
Cut the lobes, and fill your pockets,
with the fat now oozing south,
from nostrils, cunt, and vile mouth.
A pocket full of empty mind.
No wit, nor intellect to find.
A will of any sort would help,
instead we have a lazy pout.
Trout Kraut Sprout
lalalalalala
Hold your head in hands and weep
tap the ground with toe and scrape the gravel from between the grooves

D Chapman: Mortality is committed to the physical phobia of entropy. Even "being" and "becoming" frame the organism in a non superconductive state weighed down by burgeoning effects of gravity. The Freud-Newtonian theory of resistances suggests neurosis as an inefficient or blocked passage of energy residing within the organism, while psychosis suggests superconductive discharge because it is uninhibited. The body can be jettisoned beyond identity, ostensibly because it is obsolete.

Oooh look! Another random hole in an otherwise perfectly functional Montreal street....

"I think the danger is not that art is frivolous; I think the danger is that the people who make it might be so."
William Pope.L

In the last 40 years we have witnessed a vastly increased internationalization of art and the art world, which, largely, can be accounted for by better communication, especially via the Internet, and cheap air travel. We have watched the biennialization of the art world, the rise and rise of the curator and the collecting classes. We have been blockbustered, and watched the art museum become a theme park for mass tourism. I'd like to say there's a more informed public, and higher visual literacy than before, but I'm not sure if this is necessarily true. It's OK to like art now, but what difference does it make if you do?
It is easier to be an artist now, but harder to know what art to make. For art and artists London has changed for the better, New York for the worse. Berlin is cheap, Paris is still sleeping, Madrid is a mess and Shanghai is not a realistic option. Nevertheless, the world gets ever more horrible, everywhere.

With thanks to Adrian Searle

A starlet asks a boy what inserts are. He replies ''Ínserts, Miss Cake, are close-ups, simply garish interludes in the progress of the whole''.

"There is nothing more treacherous than this attraction down deep abysses", wrote Jules Verne in A Journey to the Centre of the Earth.
Now, the whole beautifully grotesque scenography of the subterranean has been suppressed, in favour of a flatly reassuring slogan: 'Ímpervious. Impregnable. Invisible.'

A caravan of curdled clots
A house
that colours have forgot