Celebrity Painters

While I was walking through the center of Oxford last week I noticed a really great in the window of a commercial gallery. It was a self portrait (with his mother) by Rolfe Harris. It was really light and colourful and reminded me of the sort of hand painted advertising posters from the 40's/50's, the kind that you see advertising holidays in Devon and Cornwall.

So anyway, when I got home I decided to check out celebrity painters online to see who else does it. Most are pretty bad, some are good. Dennis Hopper, Vigo Mortensen, Tony Curtis, Paul McCartney and Sylvester Stallone are all pretty good but not world shaking.

Here are some of the worst.

Frank Sinatra



Jane Seymour
I like what Jane has done here with her portrait, "together. She has recreated a sepia photo of her character in Dr Quinn Medicine Woman.



Johny Depp
Almost as good as the Bart Simpson a friend of mine did at school.You are a massive Duh brain. You Dime Bar.



Paul Stanley
You are rubbish.



Muhammad Ali
Sorry Muhammad but you stink at art.

Pieter Hugo

I found these photos on line at Pieterhugo.com.
I really really love them. Take a look

Uno Moralez

See http://unomoralez.com

My wife beats me

Got this proper trailer trash domestic violence bruise. I think it looks good with a wolf t-shirt and track suit.

She is beyond good and evil

I had a really freaking weird dream last night. It was so weird that when I woke up my body felt like jelly and I had the strangest feeling that other people had just had the same dream.

In my dream I had gone to visit this new wave religious leader that everyone was really into. I was fairly confident that it was going to be a load of rubbish so when I got there and it was in a really average looking office block I was not that impressed. I was met by a dark haired woman in her thirties, dressed in a power suit. She looked a little like Miss Silk my GCSE Chemistry teacher who had really hated my guts and kept me in detention more than most other teachers at school. The woman was supposed to be some sort of medium; she sat me down and started to go into a trance. Within seconds I could feel that she had taken possession of my entire body and was controlling my actions and thought. I could hear her voice in my head and she was saying "I am beyond good and evil, I am become god" over and over again. I was fitting violently and the chairs and other furniture in the room had risen up of the floor and were circling around me, shaking and fitting to the same rhythm as myself. I knew instinctively that this woman who was controlling me had completely lost her mind and that she was going to have me kill everyone I knew and eventually kill myself. As I was looking at her she would sometimes appear as a woman and sometimes as a mannequin with a deranged blurred grin.

I woke up and my wife was grinding her teeth in the dark.

What she said reminded me of a quote I once heard from Robert Oppenheimer about the awful power that he felt on the testing the atomic bomb. He recalled the Bhagavad-Gita: "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one." and "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

Jamie does leftovers

Just watched Jamie Oliver make toast with tomato smeared on it, topped with boiled nettles and grated cheddar. That's the sort of meal I have when I have run out of food in the cupboards. Apparently that's what Greek people eat. I wonder if Greek Nationalists are targeting his home.

They should let me do the Sainsburys adverts. It is just me eating some baked beans with some stale crusts and primula squeezed on top. Then I turn to the camera and say "mmmmmm, Real food" with a sincere half-smile.

Other recipes include

Rice with salad cream and salt
Peanuts on cake
Peas and oven chips soup
Mustard pasta bake
Peppered hot eggs in chicken soup (or madonna and child)
Kettle cooked noodles with Aspirin and potted beef

Mo ho ho

Moho Manchester

Just woke up in Manchester after playing our first show in 8 months. It was really good. We tried out some of the new material and it seemed to be received pretty well… made me think that actually having spent all this time writing and not doing gigs has been well spent as now we have a bunch of songs that I feel really happy with and that are a hopefully some of our best yet.

My highlight of the evening was watching two guys fighting in the city centre. They were both pretty drunk and loony so neither one was more in the right than the other but there is still something fairly upsetting about watching someone push a guy out of his wheelchair and stamp on his head. There must be a song lyric in there somewhere.

Also we went and did a session on the mark Riley show on 6 Music which I think went well. He is a friendly guy and I always forget he was in the Fall until we have left the studio, which is lucky for him or I would bore him to death with nerdy questions. I always imagine Mark E smith to be a bit like Charles Manson. Really convincing and eloquent but ultimately bitter and nasty.

Bands that reference eastern stuff to make themselves sound exotic and interesting.
Japan
Japandroids
China Crisis
There are lots more but I can’t think of them right now.