Alimentary remnants, a series of commodities like the Rolo, plastic bottles, or cheese reoccur as leitmotifs connecting the sculpture, video, and sound to the drawings, and the hackneyed and crooked crescent at a glance also suggest that a regular to create a space.  Impressive though over setting the primal scene, a powerful contingency accumulative elements intimately involving sites.  This time when a face rises up, it is a face in maniacal mid laughter which leaves the works formally open but with an honest, personal texture.  It was where they would protest it was a protest at all, fast forward to smells like your grandparents basement, having swiped the curator’s shoes and nailed them to the floor. The moment came, though, when you realised not only was it was a game, but one that you’re already part of.

Entrapping in an effective incision of reserved romanticism, picked up the idealist trope and laid it bare.  The blurring of such boundaries episode (though it did at one point have to be kicked back into action after being stuck in a cluster of chairs for a long five minutes).  Movement unraveling its singular hold to create a vision in the conditional tense in the past, present and future.  Varies in quality amongst oneiric declared quiet implicitly medium of her work, re-contextualising our understanding of change.  Occupying a precarious threshold, undeniable doctor acknowledges its own two dimensionality.  Nostalgic simultaneously, that defines the contours, beginning to question and explore what her characters are made of and the reality of her imagination; her windows and bowels form a thematic passage from which these anthropomorphic occupations hesitantly materialize, towards a gesture that allows a more space for the viewer.

Abandoned proposal conscious the moment after about to uninitiated, the most direct art straight outwards from their motions through the hand of drawing in reverse.  His large detailed pencil drawings of the scene are our only proof of this.  Layered that accompanies our readings in the space, watching a large scale reenactment of the Boer War, who has cast himself in dual role of both hunter and artist.  Dystopia places fleshing out the combination of vibrancy and stagnancy exuded from every facet: horrid. (Insert witty reconfigured ad slogan here.) Its occupation of a structure only the artists of were determined to fully illustrate this point, subjecting the audience to a chess-like set of strategic placements and limited possibilities. Ascribing to an Althusserian use of antihumanist ideology, the exhibition traps the audience within the structures it forces us to occupy, aware but unable to move beyond.

I’m walking across the parking lot in the bright autumn sun.  I’m wearing sunglasses, and a baseball cap if only because my hair was sticking straight up like Blade Runner.

‘Hey, dude!’ I hear behind me.

A man is leaning over his passenger seat toward his rolled down window.

‘Is the Book Nook around here?’

‘Um…not nearby. But there’s a second hand book shop just there, just across the road.’

‘Over there?’

‘Just next to the Kinkos.’

‘Thanks man.’

It’s only then I question what prompted him to call me ‘dude,’ and also why I knew he was addressing me.  Standing on the sidewalk waiting to cross, he drives by in his BMW and gives me a waves with two fingers from his steering wheel.  I nod and quickly look away.

The exhibition is overcrowded, lit dramatically and illegible.  Statues and engravings sit a random intervals accompanied by several names; the reign, their heir.  I assume all of them are skilled fiberglass replicas; why risk the travel after three millennia?  Behind the seated statue of one pharaoh, a father is pointing to the marks carved in the throne.

‘I can read hieroglyphics.  See, “A bird…flies over the waters…to the music…of the wind.”  See the bird, then…’

Every time I witness a shameless act of parenting, I’m reminded of an old teacher who used to take occasions speaking about children to emphasize the endless possibilities for control.  ‘You’re God to them,’ he’d say with a far-gone twinkle. ‘You’re in the car, turn on the windshield wipers, and you can make it rain!  You can make the rain stop!  Anything you tell them, they’ll believe.’  He was an English teacher.

As I walk on, I can hear the man repeating his reading, and the precise rephrasing of his statement makes me wonder whether he can actually read them.

I haven’t gone very far when a young fellow walks by.  He’s wearing a thick silver chain with a sparkling superman ‘S’ bouncing off the thick material of his hoodie.  A well cultivated mustache sticks out from his young, lanky lip.  ‘Yeah, I can pretty much read those signs,’ he says with a nod. ‘That language they use.’

‘Oh yeah?’ his female companion asks.

‘Yeah, no problem,’ he says

I am at a vegetable stall picking the large stalks of lemongrass.  The woman next to me is talking casually into her small cell phone.

‘You mean she’s not gonna come?  Just make her.  No.  Just get her phone.  Nah.  Hold on.  What about lemongrass?  What do you do with lemongrass?  Hold on.’

She presses the cell phone into her shoulder.  Turns to me.

‘What is lemongrass?  How do you use this stuff?’

I’m bemused, the sudden expert.  ‘It’s for Thai-like dishes, a fragrant, tough lemon like thing, here smell it.’

‘I’ve got a cold, can’t smell nuthin.’

‘You strip of the tough outside and use it like garlic, at the start of a dish.’

‘Okay’ she says uncertainly, picking up her phone again, wandering a bit further down,

‘…hold on I’ll ask him’ she says, and turns to me again.  ‘What about butternut squash?  How do you cook it?’

‘Bake it.  Or you could boil it, but baking’s better.  Cut it in half, scoop out the seeds like a pumpkin, put a bit of butter or oil, should be done in 45 minutes.’

‘About 375″

‘Ooh.  I only know celcius.  Medium high heat.  375 sounds about right.’

She places the phone against her ear again.  ‘He says bake it.  Bit a butter, or oil, olive oil.’

I head off down the aisle looking for limes.

I’m sitting in a hollowed out corner of a pub, a deserted Whetherspoons in an airport hallway.  Sat down, the football news ticking away wallpaper.  A man with a thick mustache, a camouflage jacket tucked into his belt, walks towards a man sitting to my left.

‘You mind if I join ya?’

‘Go right ahead.’

‘So you’re flyin to…’

‘Atlanta.  Yourself?’

‘Goin back to Alaska.  Live in Tunisia, flyin through Paris this morning.  Of course, the strikes on there.  I get there this morning, my flight to Seattle’s canceled.  The strike, they say.  But they’re flyin to Stansted, so here I am.’

They trade pleasantries.  One is an auditor, an IT auditor.  The other an oil man, overseeing new drilling projects.  A man brings a plate of food to the auditor.

‘Can I get a whole lot of ketchup?’

‘There are packets of ketchup on the counter over there, sir.’

He gets up to get a handful of the sachets.  A minute later, after sitting down, he halts conversation.

‘Sorry, just have to take this mustard back up there.  Don’t even have yellow mustard.’

He comes back, resumes, ‘That english mustard, it’s not mustard, they put horseradish in it.  Don’t even tell you.  Can’t find normal mustard no where.’

‘I just bring all my own food,’ the oil man states proudly.  ‘Last time brought sixty pounds of moose meat with me.’

‘How you bring it over?’

‘Oh I freeze it.  Still frozen by the time I get there.  And I got me a nice girlfriend over there, she’s the least American woman you’d ever meet.  She’s like, “Am I enough for you?  Are you happy with me?”  She’s great.  I have an apartment for her, we got satellite tv all hooked up there, so when I go there I can just chill out.  I don’t stay the night, it’s just too…’  I think he says ‘too far from work’ here, but I’m not sure.  ‘So I go over, eat a meal, chill out, then head off.’

I hurry, finish my drink and get out of the hole as soon as I can.

I pull in on the bike.  A gang of pigeons is stooped around a flattened half a roll, not even budging as I go by.  A truck parked by the side of the road starts to pull out, pauses.  I think its because of the pigeons he’s halting, but he’s not even looking that direction.  His front bumper is close, but the gang hasn’t budged.  He lurches out, two fly upwards lazily, another two scutter forward, speeding up then flying once the truck tails them down.  After he’s left, one pigeon is still there, a patch of dark red from its neck.  Twitching, its legs given out from under it, just next to the curb.

Just then a rubbish truck steams up.  I look away as its double wheels are heading straight for it.  The truck hesitates, waiting for another car at the curb to pull away, then speeds on around the corner.  The bird’s head  has disappeared

I take the bike to the shop to get the bottom bracket tightened.

A man and his daughter are there in the thin aisle, with a pram.  They’ve picked out a helmet for the girl.

‘Would you like a bag for that?  She does, pleased as punch to have it.

The pram starts making noises, a baby gurgling and moaning.  The father is paying for the helmet, the daughter turns to the pram.

‘No,’ she says, ‘ you can’t have a helmet!  It’s my helmet.’

The baby is still making noises, spurting as if about to cry.  The girl rocks the pram slightly.

‘Nope.  You’re only two years old!  You’re too young for a helmet.  And besides, it’s mine.’

_________________________________________________________

Later, I am riding down Mare Street.  A bus slows down and pulls over, but before I can get around I have the additional obstacle of an extremely slow cyclist.  I pull around both and speed up, to find a truck pulled halfway onto the road, waiting for an open spot to go the opposite direction.  I slow down, and drift to the left a bit.

‘Excuse me,’ I hear, followed by an unintelligible sentence.  I turn, and it is the cyclist I just passed.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I said, it is customary to pull in AFTER you pass someone, not whilst you are passing them.’  Her pronunciation is crisp, exact.

‘I was stopping for the truck.’

‘Yes, but you pulled in whilst you were doing so.’

‘I didn’t realise.’  I give her my most heavily sardonic ‘I apoligise’ and cycle off.

Minutes later, I am practicing my usual habit of coming up with silent comebacks after the fact.  I’m sorry, you were so slow I thought I had passed you already.  Oh really, I really didn’t know I had to pass you and THEN pull over.

_______________________________________________________

Pulling out from the light coming off London Bridge, a wave of cyclists spill forward.  A bendy bus is not quite in the way, having started out into the intersection as our light changed.  We are having no real obstruction, but this doesn’t stop the cyclist to my right going up on his feet, opening his mouth wide and sticking his tongue out at the bus driver.  Seems unnecessary to me, but he’s fast and assured so I imagine he’s had an earlier encounter.

At the next light, he’s in front.  The light changes, and his chain slips.  We all head on, while he’s still fiddling with gears.  In a new light, he is young, adolescent, misplaced and awkward.

I am waiting for the platform to be announced.  Looking up at the parade of train names under the Departures sign.  Individual heads looking up, waiting.  For the same train, I think. There is a desk behind me, a help desk, a woman with a binder and a tatter or worn pages inside.  She is talking to a younger man standing beside her, both wearing the different shades of blue marking a transportee.
‘…if they’ve got the gift of the gab, they just talk and talk,’ he says.
‘And they’re just the worst.  The laziest, the most useless…’
A woman with a buggie walks up towards past the desk, stops.
‘For the 10:24 to Manchester, when will be able to board?’ Patient, innocent.
‘You’ll have to look at the departures board,’ the woman says stiffly. ‘It’s still getting ready.’
My platform is announced.  The stream of heads turn and start walking fast.  Several people are running.
On the ramp down, I remember the arc of a bird.  We were driving from Galway to Dundalk, a damp gray morning, a low gray car, deep shrubs lining the road.  A sparrow or starling made a slow, graceful glide over the hedge ahead of us, bouncing with a thud off the bonnet of the car.  It went upwards, higher than before, landing lightly on the road behind us.  It was ballet, dead.

I steer the three of us into the Cancer Research charity shop, because the week before their display window had held a series of commemorative cat plates that I thought would be perfect for my flatmate’s birthday. The shop is decked out in pink: ribbons, balloons, posters.

‘Would you like a biscuit?’ The hunched woman at the counter asks.

‘No thanks, I’ve only brushed my teeth.’

‘How about if you donate a pound for breast cancer? You can pick a balloon and maybe win five pounds, you can name a duck, or you can guess how many sweets in the jar.’

I give her a pound, saying I wouldn’t need any sweets.

‘Why don’t you pick a baloon? You could win five pounds.’

‘Some people have already won five pounds,’ another shop keeper chimes in. ‘They’re really in there.’

My friend gives a pound a picks a balloon. The woman asks me to pull it down for her, and the thumb tack pinning it to the ceiling falls as well.  My friend winces and looks away as I’m pushing the tack into the balloon, and it disappears from her hands.  Picking up the rolled up paper on the floor, the finds she hasn’t won anything.

I pick the one just above my head.  Bursting the balloon, the dark roll I’d seen inside is simply gone.  We look on the floor, the table, it’s not there.  As my friend’s boyfriend begins his choice, the woman finds a thin strip of pink membrane, a small bit of paper hanging from, dangling off a miniature column on the side of the decorated table dedicated to breast cancer fund raising goodies.  I haven’t won anything either.

Greg, however, has two lumps of paper in his balloon, and the larger one turns out to be ‘£5′, written in pink.   He immediately says, ‘Ah, I’ll just donate that money.’

‘Are you sure?’ The woman asks incredulously.  ‘That’s very nice of you.’  I had just been thinking we could get a fiver off if we bought anything.

Later, we are walking down Turnpike Lane.

‘Isn’t there any real food?’ My friend asks under her breath.  She’d just turned down a samosa from the store we just left.  I remember a small sandwich deli around the corner that I believe she’ll be comfortable with, so we begin trekking that way.  I’m relieved that it is there, that it is open.  The woman running the shop is sitting at the one table in the long room that makes up the ‘Sandwich Cabin’, talking in a language I don’t recognize to a grey haired gentleman.  His sandwich is grilled, I can see tomatoes.  Greg orders his: chicken, salad, nothing else.  My friend gets the same, I think.  She seems so sullen and serious faced, I can’t tell if she’s relieved to be getting a sandwich, unhappy about the choices, doesn’t like the woman making her food, or if my neighborhood has scarred her in some way.  I turn over my shoulder, looking out onto the road, just in time to see a rat scamper in the doorway, following the wall into the Cabin.

The man looks up from the table to me, then back at the door way.

‘Was that…?’ He says it quietly.

‘Yes.’ I say, smiling uncertainly and raising my eyebrows.  He looks surprised, sits down again occasionally glancing at the corner past the display counter.  I decide not to tell my friends.

Minutes earlier on the night bus, she had stuffed our engagement ring down the front of my shirt.  Our stop had come up.  As I shuffled my way to the exit alone, one of the two hoodies in front of me half turned.

‘Smoke on this,’ he said, and I heard a fizzing as he tossed something into the bus.

‘You fucking bastards!’ Someone yelled.  The firework was kicked out of the doors just before they closed, bouncing off the bus stop advertising to under the bus.  I was walking away when the loud, cringing sound went off.  One fellow in the bus had decided to confront them, banging on the door of the bus, shouting threats.  The two hoodies taunted him from the outside as the bus stood at the red light at that immediate corner.

‘Put in in the hole,’ I heard one of them say, as another firework went off somewhere beneath the bus.  The light changed, and the two scampered off across the intersection.  Around that corner, a tall, shaven-head man was pacing around his motorcycle parked on the paving.

‘What the fuck man?’ He said, looking at me pleadingly.  I stopped, thinking he was going to talk about the two pyrotechnicians just witnessed.

‘They come in, they meet two guys, then they just go.  That’s supposed to be my fiancee.’  He looks at me wide-eyed. ‘My fucking fiancee!’

I turn and keep walking.