Cheekerboard Cheeks

Joe does Ben.

Doodle See, Doodle Do

So, in continuation of the London Sketch series here is Clare Wood's right handed portrait of my good self. Keep your eyes peeled for tomorrow's.

London Characters

During a recent brief visit to London, where I chanced upon some fine types, this occured. A challenge was set of drawing a portrait of our fellow drinkers (external company excluded) with your unfavoured hand. This is the fabulous effort of Ben Haggar esquire (but not Ted Theodore Logan) drawn with his right hand (being left handed). The task gave me the firm belief that I should stick to photography at least until I have done some serious practice in various sketchbooks. I have never really been inspired to sketch and rarely even doodle but really should more often after my pitious attempts were trounced by three far better draftsmen/woman. During our trip we managed to find two extremely excellent pubs especially compared to the usual standard of pubs in London. One of the main factors struck while sat in the second of the two, no music. No piped Killers to talk over. Hurrah! Perhaps this slew of portraits were inspired by our recent visits to both the National Portrait Gallery and to the Royal Academy of Arts to see a Munch exhibition, who was as I discovered a decided advocate of the self portrait.
Anyway, portraits = damn good stuff in my book.

Back To The Black

This post is going to start with a bit of medical talk but don't switch off yet I will move past it as quickly as possible and get on with the point with as much haste as necessary. So, I am sure you all aware that I work in a hospital. Well, today I saw for the first time the implant of a device known as an Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator (ICD). This device is implanted into patients who in the past have suffered from (and indeed may be susceptible again to) life threatening heart rhythms such as ventricular fibrillation in which the heart muscle becomes completely uncoordinated and death is imminent. Now, the only way to regain the correct rhythm of the heart is to give the famous "clear,............. and shock" treatment (defibrilation) much re-enacted in all good and bad medical drama. The idea is to short circuit this bad rhythm and allow the heart own intrinsic rhythm to take hold again. Anyway an ICD is like a pocket sized version of the defibrilator connected directly to the heart. After the device is implanted it must be tested. So a DC current is passed throught the heart to purposely send the patient into this deadly rhythm. The device is then given a short space of time to recognise the rhythm and shock the heart. It is only a matter of around 10 seconds for the device to recognise, charge and discharge.

As I am sure you can appreciate however those seconds are ones of great trepidation. The senses become hightened and a collective sigh is exhaled as a normal rhythm is regained. Now, during all procedures it is quite normal for a little music to be playing, normally something completely unobtrusive and unalarming and such was the case here. Out of the laboratory player was wafting the swinging tunes of that bloody swing album by that modern musical Mephisto, Robbie Williams. So as the patient was plunged into the hands of fate what was assaulting our eardrums but some talentless git from Stoke. A moment of clarity hit and a single thought entered my mind "God, I hope I don't die listening to such dreadful music". Luckily the patient was fine and will now be free to choose his own death tune. I swear every time I open a dreadful newspaper such as the Sun, News of the World etc I am confronted by the same story every slow news day, most requested songs at a funeral. Ok, I'm sure this is important to some people but it seems much more important to me to ensure that as those white lights grow brighter Tom Jones cannot be heard sining 'The Green Green Grass Of Home'. As to what my prefered taste would be I haven't a clue apart from something I like....alot. As I speed about on my bike through and around inner city traffic. headphones firmly glued in my ears, each near miss seems to evoke this question time and time again. I always have visions of paramedics arriving on the scene (I am dead already) and using the music that I was listening to as a sort of post mortem clue to the method of my death. For example the scene might go something like so....paramedic jumps out of ambulance runs to the scene, feels for a pulse, failing to find one he prizes the inner ear headphone from the grasp of my ear lobe upon hearing the last few bars of Raw Power by Iggy Pop and the Stooges he assumes a quick death brought on by my own thirst for speed and reckless abandonment of the highway code. In another world I was an innocent cruelly crushed by vicious motorists due to my leaning toward british folk rock music such as Who Knows Where The Time Goes? by Fairport Convention. All this leads me to think that it should be the patients and not the surgeons who request the music at such life threatening moments as open heart surgery. Who cares if you're awake or off with the angels. It could even turn into a sort of Desert Island Discs moment, whatever song you last hear that song will be the only one you can take with you to the other side the only difference being that on one hand it is looped for all eternity and on the other you decide when it plays.

The attached picture is of me. Maybe you guessed. The original picture was rather bland and documentary, taken in my room. With a little jiggery-pookery it was transformed into what it resembles now which is certainly more exciting. Although it does seem to detract from all the pictures I have seen in this style which seemed so stylised and cool, knowing how easy it is to produce this effect seems to lessen their impact.

Oh well, hope all that talk of death didn't put a downer on your day. Go and enjoy the rest of it!

Hulla Baloo

Got to write this quick as there is a scheduled outage later. This pictue was taken during a fruitful trip to St.Andrews. The reaon I like this picture is the weird scale of everything and how they seem to play off each other. It was taken in a bar. The walls were plastered with dreadful photographs, beautifully taken but mere copies of pictures they themselves the photgrapher had seen already. Tired. And all selling for about £70 or so. I suppose they were above the usual tat printed on posters. Ben has never been one comfortable in front of the camera and it shows again here. Having been shot many times throughout the week he had begun to get used to it but still retained some resistance resulting in this challenging look toward the lenses. The background features one of the aforementioned pictures. Well done to the artist.

In The Navy Now

Today's post is dedicated to a good friend of mine. That handsome chap is of course Alexandros Iliakis, pictured above. In recent weeks he has had to start his basic training for the Greek navy. A requisite for all Greek males. I think that this would have to be one of my worst nightmares, not because of the physical hardship and so forth (he tried to say without sounding at all macho) but the simple fact that the purpose of your training is to learn to kill other people, sort of clinches it for me (damn civillians). I know that this seems a little over the top these days. I mean the chances are that Alex will never be involved in a single truely meant violent act in his whole time and will spend most of his time scrubbing decks and performing drills and so forth but the threat remains. I am comforted by the fact that another friend of his having completed his basic training in the army is now simply stationed on guard at a gold bullion depository, left to chase shadows the whole night.
Who knows, maybe a fabulous naval film epic will be born out of this whole affair starting Alex on his way to directorship.

Anyway this picture was sent to me by Alex's dad as part of a selection taken during a brief period of freetime for the conscripts on the island of Poros where he is stationed. It certainly stuck out for me. Perhaps because it is reminiscent of so many pictures I have taken of him myself.

I shall have to find my raconteur hat again. It seems to have gone missing in the past couple of weeks. Maybe I left it in Greece? Or maybe it's at the bottom of that never emptying basket of laundry? Did I ever tell you about the time I found some Aztec treasure at the bottom of a Mexican washing basket...........

Horror

Well, I think that is quite long enough for the last image. Over a week ain't bad going. Here is the new image and it's pretty cool too. I took this picture of one of Daphne's (Alex's sister) friends. Unfortunately I forgot to turn on the flash and simply got a dull black blob in a soup of low level highlights. I started to play with the photo in the ubiquitous photoshop, playing with the contrast, brightness and what not and look what popped out. This picture now always reminds me of The Exorcist or of grunge music videos such as Smells Like Teen Spirit. Any takers?
(What? Did you really expect a maintainence of such high quality?)