Author: philbrightonphil

Photos – memories of Semiotics of the Kitchen – Star casts, Amma and reflections.

Many of you will know I spent a long time making star shaped casts of people’s nips. There are some people who’s nips Zuck gets upset seeing for free on the internet so they need to be censored or you’ll get banned.

I decided to make casts of nips so that people could censor their nips with casts of their own nips.

I love reflection and this shot of Amma wearing her casts as she used them to do various chores, was a struggle that I won in a way I’m v pleased with.

She’d stuck them on with tape and nips have minds of their own – fiddle about with them and sticky and they become e r e c t .. and fall off repeatedly.

Anyway – twas fun and the intentional woman-in-kitchen set-up, alongside the obvious subversion and rejection of the sexualisation of nips (which were, unexpectedly, having a physical, sexual response) made it both a giggle and, for me, a reminder of Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975).

It’s a reminder that protest is important and a serious matter – it’s the patriarchy, stupid – but that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun with it. Nipple Stars, alongside Free the Nipple, do make nips the stars but even though they can be pointy, they aren’t the point. That is the sexualisation and commodification of bodies bound up with what, later, Bateman referred to as the modesty cult (Naked Feminism.. it’s not an adequate book btw) and the whole fuck-off-with-it campaign to stop telling women what to wear.

Tbh – rather obviously, I greatly miss being able to discuss (health) radical feminism and our shared experience of rejecting the gender norms applied to each of us because of our genitals.. friends dying is a bummer.

Sunday morning bed laying, knees still hot and aching from middle of the night waking in pain and, as always, overheated.

I’m reading my book – I say ‘my’ book, but it’s obviously not by me, of course, I don’t write things. Robin Ince is saying about solitude being a safer place than groups for many of us – I’ve known that feeling but I now crave humans though from within a shy mind.

As I read, several conversations run in different directions as ticker tape, Teletext: trains that pass and I can hear the brief snippets of passengers as they pass by – passing by in all directions – trains, people, chatter, fill my mind and mingle with words and thoughts from the book.. and wondering about the weather, the wind, the sea.

A thrumping in my left ear – not quite a sound, not quite a pain, adds a distortion and a sip of luke warm coffee some soft brown with a hint of green, a thickening – things that foods do – colours and textures – and who can eat foods that are just browns and muddy yellows.. at least have some mushy peas.

Knees burning.

Robin says about how people tell him their anecdotes and he observes (perhaps he merely thinks he does) the moments when they, as he does, as I do, lose faith in our words mid story – we feel suddenly that all we are saying is boring and we remember that usually it’s best to say nothing as, when we do, surely we are boring.

Just like dad, just like dad, just like dad. Fuck, he could bore for England and he did it with such a passion. He’d spot the twitches of an urge to leave and move in closer, getting tighter in, into comfort zones, inside personal spaces – bitter, turdy breath, in my nostrils. We’d be in for as long as we’d stand for it… I learned to break away and often that’d require rudeness as he wouldn’t respond to the usual body language or polite excuses by which people usually express their desire, their need, to move on. Enough, enough, do shut up, can’t you get it.. it’s not interesting, shut up.

Coffee, back to the book.. or the Spanish. Or get up. Breakfast. But swimming.

The book is taking a while to read.

Horror Drawer – the Day Reconning!

The ancients spoke of a day of reconning, a day of endings and of terrible truths. A day when all of the lids without pots, and all of the pots without lids, would be separated from their more useful kin and taken to the Recycling Bin of Doom.

And, all of the icky bits of crumbs and other gross matters would be tipped out onto the Floor of Shame (I’ll do that later, give me a chance – I can’t clean and be distracted from cleaning simultaneously.. where did I put my tea..).

Forever more (about 3 weeks) the place of pots with lids could be seen, by all who stooped to look, to be.. Quite Tidy.

Ex-work observations – not such easy reading. [Edit – Not easy at all, but it’s just a thing, things make life rich, it’s not a call for help.. it’s the sort of thing though that was the start of me spotting that a hug and a cuppa are good things]

The first thing I usually do, before 7, is turn on my work phone to check early morning messages. This has been largely unnecessary for years and years but the habit was burnt in.

My second job, soon after I started, included urgent briefing to ministers, direct on the phone, if there had been a serious road traffic incident overnight. I had to get info to them so they could go on the Today prog between 8 and 9.

What counted as “serious” was set by criteria – more than 5 killed, 3 if children, or in a tunnel, a fire, a bus/coach – something novel. There would be faxes ready for me to read when I got in soon after 6am. Most incidents happen over night and in the worst death times, the early hours as drivers fell asleep or were drunk, or just speeds on empty roads.. or all of those things.

The faxes were typed by very tired, very busy, very stressed police officers in a rush – they were hard to make sense of.. I’d pick through to see how many people had died and if their deaths had been awful enough to interest the media.

9 people – 5 teens died as their car caught fire after they drove, fast and drunk, into a couple with a baby and a toddler who had parked in a layby to sleep.. that sort of thing. The police described their injuries – ‘skinned face’, ‘hands missing,’ ‘can’t tell what sex’ ‘child or dog – no limbs, too charred’.

Occasionally one like that hit the criteria. I’d have to ring the phone no on the fax and try to get hold of an officer actually dealing with the case. This would always be a live incident – patched through via a radio to the road side, awful line, sirens blaring, shouting. .. I had to get info from extremely busy people – precise details, speculation of the cause, when would it all be clearer up.

I was not at all popular, I had to be very determined to bully info out of the police – they’d shout at me, I’d have to shout back knowing if I gave up I’d just have to call back. My boss would be on another phone (he was usually still at home, not in at 6 – he only covered the work when I was on leave) barking at me to get more info and also to have the minister’s office on a 3rd phone. They’d be shouting at me to say whether or not the press were aware – who else had the police briefed, and who knows what.. it was an awful adrenaline filled nightmare.. I cycled in, 45 mins, from Tottenham, via Camden, Trafalgar Square, into Westminster.. I cycled fast, very fast.. must be in by 6.

Obviously, most days, the small pile of faxs, as I picked through the daily numbers of dead, their injuries, their likelihood of living, the ‘serious’ criteria point wouldn’t be reached. .. 1 man died on his motorbike on the Ilminster Bypass (well known locally as dangerous… mildly newsworthy) .. his head was missing.. his family found it, still in it’s helmet, a mile away.

A dad had driven to the shops to buy a child safety seat and was driving home when he drove, fast, into a tree and the heavy (not yet fitted) child seat flew out of the uncovered boot and killed the child who never got to sit in it.

A man and 2 kids were fine, completely unhurt, after they drove fast into some wooden fencing beside a motorway – but a section of fence had gone through the windscreen, though the face and skull and headrest of the woman (mother) in the passenger seat and skewered her there in front of them… It was the thought of the three of them fine, sat there with her, so dead, that never left me.

The faxs continued through the days – I’d pick through, reading the dry, clunky, police-speak version of horrors – most lives and limbs are lost in unexpected ways, death takes people by surprise, mostly.

That was 1991-93.. somehow it’s still in my mind whenever the phone rings unexpectedly, it’s still what I expect with early morning texts, it’s what I was expecting as I checked my work phone this morning.. but stopped.. the phone is off.. it’s staying off..

… so hard not to check it or just to check my own phone the moment I’m awake.

As years pass, it’d be cool if we could select the memories to keep and those to lose.

One Sunday morning, at some point in 1986(ish), I was rooting around the endless tat in Brick Lane market. We’d swerve the National Front stalls, delight in the smells of cooking from the restaurants, avoid the pickpockets and men in bloodied butcher garb hawking black bin mags of ‘meat’ – am I saying £20 a bag a meat? No! Am I saying £15 a bag a meat? No! Am I saying £10 a bag a meat? No – £5 a bag of meat!! Just £5 for a huge bag of meat!!

Wandering about with my friend David ( Sophy Burleigh .. I suspect he won’t remember this highlight of one Sunday decades ago) I was looking for another shoe to go with a good one (a black plimsoll) I’d just found in a pile of rubbish.. it’d be somewhere.. and fuck me, I found it. We (I) had very little (no) money – I’d drunk it all.

I was amazed to see David interested in an object that I considered to be entirely irrelevant to our grimy lives – a thingy for keeping cutlery tidy. And, FFS, he bought  it, he spent 50p on a used, orange, cutlery drawer thingy.. that was more than the price of a half pint of beer. The sort of thing that’d be 50p in a charity shop now.

Seriously.. at 22/3yo David was a couple of years older than me and, quietly, I thought he was cool.. but 50p for that thing, I wondered what had become of him.

But hey, nearly 40 years on I’ve just given it a wash cos it’s still keeping my cutlery tidy.

This might not be an easy read, it’s not even a necessary one. Post fucking-shit experience rarely seems to leave you disorder.

Sometimes stuff falls out – makes a noise, like lots of crockery, falling from a high cupboard – mind the sharp edges, clean up, move on… but for the smell of soot, like a pigeon pulled from a chimney. Early morning phone calls.

Walking home from the cinema last night, I stopped near a house that had been on fire earlier in the day. The fire crew were still pumping water in through the roof – filthy, sooty water pouring out through the doors and away down the street where, while the fire was blazing earlier, locals had brought chairs and beers out to watch. They’d gone in now, it’d rained heavily while I was watching Nomadland, chased them from the street back inside their homes – I hope they are homes.

Dark smoke stains up the walls from the windows – still basically a house still, 3 floors, the roof and all. But, I’m guessing the contents were fucked – homeliness is no wet soot and charred remains.

The smell of wet soot, wet burnt wood even burnt concrete has a smell – stone in wet in soot and smoke. It’s not an easy smell to shake, it’s always just about me like I’ve stood in shit but it’s gone and the smell is not…

– I’ve posted this photo before – one of the few recognisable objects after my dad burnt the house down. The house, that ‘family’ house wow, of the 5 of us that lived in it originally 3 are dead, 2 of them killed themselves, 1 clung onto life too long after her sweet mind left her body behind.

Dad always accused me of stealing the typewriter – but it was found in the rubble where his bedroom had collapsed, so it was probably in there all along. I remembered his amazing old Leica camera, he’d never let me use it even though he’d never use it himself – I guess it was under that rubble too.. unfound, not a typewriter.

Things.

I really felt for the people who’d lived in that house until yesterday. It’s hard to describe the feeling of the loss of pretty much every ‘thing’ – photos, mementos, gifts, books, crafted things, embroideries, drawings, 50s pointed dancing shoes, paintings, the pots and pans my mum cooked with, her ‘best’ china, gardening shoes, boots, plants, tools, screws and hooks – beds, sheets, clothes, the towels, soap, passports, birth certificates, school reports, dad’s papers from 75 years of never really ever stopping working, piano, clocks, graduation photos, records, car keys, the car, door keys, the doors, windows, floors, walls, pipes, roof. All exchanged for soot, rubble, some melted glass and a dead typewriter. We found lots of wet, dirty, photos too, oddly – spent weeks drying them – brought the stench into my house, spread our wet, torn, burnt, filthy remains out on the table…

Mostly people don’t choose, with furious neglect, to destroy everything they ever valued with so many of the memories of ours too that’ll fade a little faster without the objects and the place where they sat.

I like feet. I like bodies. I was lazily thinking in the small hours about the feel of skin and what a massage therapist had once said to me about how it feels to touch and stroke and rub into the skins and flesh and muscles of many people… backs, shoulders, arms, chest, buttocks, legs, hands, cheeks and feet. It occurred to me that I almost never touch the skins of people, other than their hands. If they are not my most loved ones, I rarely touch another human – almost never.

She, my once lover, was a massage therapist for a while and the mother of our children (always), described the bodies of younger people, smooth and firm and how it feels compared to that of older people.. like the softest, smoothest leather, over bones and tendons – the textures of the body beneath. And about harder, rougher skin, scars, and hairs – how they move and respond to the sliding and pressing of the massaging strokes. There was nothing but interest and curiosity and awareness of it all – I felt my joy was greater than hers. She is a visual person, touch was extra, but not perhaps so much .. 

Me, I bury my hands in the sand and swim in the cold sea water and the air and the sun and the rain and the pebbles on my naked skin and .. I am indistinguishable from everything.

I wasn’t sure about that, not back then. Then I was squeamish about other bodies, bodies other than her’s and those of our soft, plump skinned, children.

It is a tenderness and joining of humans that I’ve really not experienced. The joy of touch is often so lost to us, restricted, understandably, as an outcome of those who seek to touch, to take, in unwelcome ways. People seek power and to take it from those who, understandably, seek to hold onto it – where is the pleasure in taking what is not given, I don’t know.

Sometimes we humans touch inadvertently; the brush of another human’s naked forearm while crushed together on the Tube – I pull back, recoiling in fears that our accidental shared moment of joining might seem an intentional act of taking… soft skin, or the feel of body hair that I am not used to, I’ve never caressed an especially hairy arm or leg… mmm but to lay semi asleep, face resting on warm belly and soft pubes, the warmth and smell of skin, bodies, the taste of .. moments though, a nurse who for once, ungloved, held my bare forearm to comfort me as was in extreme pain, her basic, human, love flowed between us, she undiminished, me filled. 

I imagine our skins are smooth partly because, as we touch and we are touched, the sensation can be the deepest bliss – it is surely not simply coincidental, a mere response to an environment at some point when we lived in warm climates – the touch joined us, shared our love and connectedness through a human poetry of touch where words, or a photograph can only say so much.

Over the smoother areas, or where there is hair, the nerves transmit a sharing of bliss – I Will it to pass from me to you, through touch, I Will for you to feel as directly as I share it, love and joy and strength, as I Will it to pass through space to you now though with words, it is only a best estimation – know it when I say it, touched.

Sometimes we friends hold hands, holding legs and arms as we pass through from now into, and through, and throughout other worlds and we meld into beings and non-beings and where we start and where we end seem like strange illusions… all points touch, we are no longer parts A and B, binaries, we are all obviously all; all parts connected and expanding, touched, not just entwined, all points as ..

I caress my loved one’s skin, thinner than it will have been in the decades before I met her – I wish I had met her sooner; I am so delighted that we met.. chances of lifetimes. 

Both of our skins wrinkle as we pass our hands over each other’s skin’s – older skins, so soft, the finest, softest leathers, warm, and smooth, and worn thiner with life and love and all that we have been and become and will be. To be naked in your arms, to spoon as we fall into sleep.

Our hands and feet, we kiss them and stroke them and with my feet I chase the last of another Saturday’s sun up the wall.