Red Success: slightly scented.

Dorothy Feaver

The sweet smell or come-hither eyes?

Nat Pimlott

hmmm…

Dorothy Feaver

(both?)

D.F.

the Prince of darkness

Nat Pimlott

for some there is a simple criterion for success

Dorothy Feaver

while others fear failure

Nat Pimlott

Andrew Gillespie

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

There, in the howling green of the woods with golf balls cracking intermittently through the upper branches of the trees above her like distant gunshot, Cathy did not scream, but calmly and with no little contempt for her newly awakened ovaries, thrust one peacock velvet glove down inside the waistband of her pants and stood, eyes closed, imagining the browning velvet so close to her and choking back something new in her throat; something between tears and laughter; something that tasted like swimming pool water.

Orlando Whitfield

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

What Emma really wanted to do was crawl into the showers and curl up in the corner.  Communal bathrooms didn’t really allow for that. Communal bedrooms didn’t really allow for lying in bed all day but Emma figured that – to a casual passerby – her catharsis would pass as an innocent siesta.

At five she would go on a long walk so that when she got back it might feel like bedtime.  That is when the tears would start rolling, down her shins and spine and the middle of her chest. The door cracked. Emma turned to face the wall.

Amy McLeod

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

No. 3, bleaching styrofoam box under fuschias; 6, curlicued table legs on spongecake flags supporting a pair of bonsai; 12, scrunchie like an offset blowhole hoofing a plume of blunt, grunge-blonde curls out wavering as, having tripped on the lip of the decking a box of balled newspaper and vari-patterned ceramics spills and lands obliquely with a granular crunch, a treasured mug kiln-fired in a friend’s teenage art class years back pinwheeling newly handleless along planks spotted with intermittent guano to butt the doorstep and rattle to a stop.

Rob Gallagher

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Lee (as in León) perched on the steps of a fountain, water drooling from lion mouth, and, twisting the lens, spied Jay ahead – snorting with every step downhill, camera thudding against tum. They’re mirror images, people said. Well, Lee had cracked, ran, leaving Jay with a dish of boquerones and hoping the crowd would stare him – snooping bitch – into the ground.

In fact Jay had run out straight after, but cut a left against Lee’s right. The pair drew a figure eight with their footprints around neighbouring squares.

Dorothy Feaver

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Clara Drummond

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Eyes scrupulously fixed on the trough below, Geoff watched the loose arc of his last Pimm’s frothing away between the deodorizers. Like little citric ping-pong balls he thought, or peeled apples. Many were pissworn to mere coins or lozenges. You can’t take it with you!

Checking his fly as he blinked out from under the eaves’ shade, Geoff tried to imagine how much ice creams would cost now, thinking he’d pick up a couple of 99s for the girls on the way back. But patting and uselessly double-patting his pockets, he found no wallet. Had he brought it? Thinking, he squinted into the hash of half-shredded posters stapled on the toilet’s outer wall.

Rob Gallagher

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Life is too short, apparently, to clean out the boot of your car.  It’s not like Keith didn’t get the chance.  He’d been turning down the volume for a while.  His wife, Susan’s mother, had life in her yet but had stubbornly refused to learn to drive; instead of her wedding bands changing hands a car had to be sold.

Susan didn’t look at the dates as she peeled back the dank wads of newspaper that sealed in the spare tyre, just like Susan would have burnt his unwashed pants if they hadn’t already been dealt with – starched and pressed.  They would definitely get more for it if they sold her with it, Susan thought. Six months MOT and diamonds included.

Amy McLeod

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Walls sign, to be fair, is misleading. Cyclists, pedalling against oncoming cloud, are unlikely to notice its spattering of rust, as if from a roadside accident, and occasionally one or two will dismount and approach the old post office, holding phones up for signal. The last postmaster had moved down from Glasgow, all blue sky thinking. Like a string of predecessors, he dreamt of a new life for himself and the place, this time transforming the shop as an online business. Few in the valley have broadband now; no-one did in the 90s.

Dorothy Feaver

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Q-rated Stasi gear

Dorothy Feaver

Beautiful plugs

Oscar Jamieson

Plug Uglies

Dorothy Feaver

Urs Fishner unplugged

Oscar Jamieson

rum plugs

Dorothy Feaver

…

more post coming soon

Dorothy Feaver

…

answers on a postcard please

…

more post coming soon

ER, THANKS FOR NOTHING

Dorothy Feaver

I like the fact that, literally, “The noughties” is a decade with a void at its centre.

On Good Friday 2008 I tried to tell people at a dinner in Chelsea an instructive moral fable involving a Japanese man and a cup that was too full of tea.

I don’t know if they got it. Or if I did.

Maybe nothing is a gift?

Matt McLean

One from the pre-digital middle of the Noughties – can’t remember where exactly, of course. I liked disposable cameras and I still like the duds: grainy, black and not much to see, they free up the memory.

Dorothy Feaver

Shooter’s Hill, 2003, above the A2 and towards Kent, I guess. I harbour a belief that exhaust fumes intensify the light.

Memories become templates. Some things are mine to forget.

Matt McLean

Round about Bologna, Aug. 2003… Strangers asleep on trains are mine to remember…

Dorothy Feaver

The problem when looking back is that there are at least as many things not done, as done.

No regrets?

Matt McLean

Dorothy Feaver

Tim Betjeman

Bottled. Hazardous. Handle with care.

Dorothy Feaver

Washed up: this dystopian landscape features great swathes of residue from ex art projects.

What happens next? . . .

Dorothy Feaver

Tim Betjeman

The future hangs in the balance: TALENT EVERYWHERE

Dorothy Feaver

___

more post coming soon…

where are they going? where are they from?

Dorothy Feaver

ping and pong

Andrew Gillespie

poor paws (massive carbon footprint)

Dorothy Feaver

lovesticklivestock

2 for 1

Andrew Gillespie

hell for leather (Zoo Art Fair, 2008….)

Dorothy Feaver

Loaded.

Dorothy Feaver

Helium filled live stock

Andrew Gillespie

Maggot filled deadstock (1999)

Dorothy Feaver

just a shell

Andrew Gillespie

shell &

Dorothy Feaver

the play’s the thing (little nipper)

Dorothy Feaver

Look out

Andrew Gillespie

round up!

Dorothy Feaver

round up

Andrew Gillespie

stay inside the vehicle

Andrew Gillespie

Stay away from the vehicle

Dorothy Feaver

Andrew Gillespie

Dorothy Feaver

Andrew Gillespie

The English coast has been hit with wave after wave of urban, bourgeois mythology. Its charm, constructed at arm’s length, is rooted in decline – from tragedies endured by noble fisherfolk, as pictured in a certain school of academic painting in the late 19th century, to the etiolation of the seaside holiday (farewell cheeky postcards and knobbly knee competitions?)

X

Dorothy Feaver

Huitrier – Pie de Mer.

There is still a fine layer of sand at the bottom of the bay and at the back a group of portuguese teenagers suck the backs of their hands noisily, pretending to kiss.

X

Lindsey Hanlon

Kiss me quack.

X

Dorothy Feaver

Soft focus flirting.

X

Dorothy Feaver

Beach

1530s, probably from O.E. bæce, bece “stream,” from P.Gmc. *bakiz. Extended to loose, pebbly shores (1590s), and in dialect around Sussex and Kent beach still has the meaning “pebbles worn by the waves.” Fr. grève shows the same evolution. The verb “to haul or run up on a beach” is first attested 1840. Beach bum first recorded 1962.

xxx

Lindsey Hanlon

Bæce bums, South Coast, 1980s.

X   X   X  x

Dorothy Feaver

West Coast, 2010

X X X

Lindsey Hanlon

In 1936, Kichizo Ishida, an innkeeper in the Tokyo suburbs, left his wife and began an affair with Sada Abe, one of the prostitutes in his employ. Kichi died in climax and Sada was put on trial for his murder. Nagisa Oshima’s film version of this legendary crime, In the Realm of the Senses (1976) acquired cult status, not least because it was widely banned (Oshima edited the footage in France to evade Japanese censorship laws). As a study in morbid obsession, the film moves relentlessly from sex scene to sex scene, leaving barely any room for narrative; it is repetitive and monotonous, rather than erotic. For me there is one moment in the film that is truly startling. Sada is on a train, parted briefly from Kichi, and she misses him so intensely that she has to go off and wrap herself in his kimono. This re-enactment of the ritual of dressing pierces the film’s vaguer of explicit nudity. Entirely enveloped in her own feelings, Sada wants to lose herself. You could be anywhere and need to put on that kind of kimono.

Dorothy Feaver

I  ♥ ♥ ♥ Japan

Anglophilia (Kagawa college car park, 2008)

Alice Feaver

Insigniaphilia: hearts on sleeves (Covent Garden, London, 2000)

Dorothy Feaver

Box of love. Osaka yen shop (2008)

Alice Feaver

my magic Japanese box: there’s nothing in it.

Dorothy Feaver

___

Great waves…

..potty craze.

One of the peccadillos among the Aesthetes of the late 19th century was a fetishization of Japanese design. This wave of drawing room Japanophilia boiled down to linear patterning, motifs of birds and branches, dark woods, and highly glazed and lacquered finishes, as seen in screens, paper fans, trays, teapots etc. – masterfully lampooned by George du Maurier in Punch.

Dorothy Feaver