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The news is grim
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 2158
It's always grim. We've had a slow week, the weather, the season, we're not a summer sort of place.
But the owner always consoles us with the bad news of the world. He talks to the food suppliers, the wine reps, other restaurants are down 50, 60% from last year. Some are months behind in paying the suppliers and their rent. He lists the restaurants, we know them, sometimes he tells us outright, other times we're left to guess the moral on our own.
We're lucky to have a job. It's tough out there. You'll never find another job this good.
The news is always grim.
The Resident Artist
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: People
- Hits: 1770
She's there first thing when I show up. The resident artist.
She hangs about the restaurant while your setting up, for no reason in particular, just hanging out. She's about 60, terrible hair, heavily overweight, obviously plastic teeth carefully molded into the original overbite by an sadistically meticulous dentist. She has a particularly vapid smile which she imagines to be charming. It's just offputting.
The staff despise her.
She hangs out, follows the owner about, talking to him...she just wants to keep in touch, and staff ignore her until she manages to catch someone's eye and avails herself of the opportunity to ask for a cappuccino. She's a freeloader. After the cappuccino she'll drop hints to the owner, she'd love some food, dessert maybe....but while she's drinking the cappuccino she talks about her many ailments. Her hip, her back, slipped discs, she's got these magnets that a friend gave her and they're doing her a world of good (and one is tempted to observe that placebos work best with psycho-somatic ailments, but she wouldn't get it...).
After a while the owner gets busy and so she follows the staff around, she has pictures of her work on a digital camera she's just happened to bring with her, commonplace mountain scenes and landscapes, they look passable, although anything looks passable when reduced to the size of a one inch LCD display. There are cougars and wolves as well, and we feign interest and remark upon her obvious talent.
We're obviously lying, but it's what she wants to hear.
And she hangs about a bit longer, mooching, trying to stick a finger in every dessert that comes out of the fridge, waiting for the owner to offer her some food but he's busy and forgets and so eventually she runs out of people to show her pictures to and she just disappears.
Banksy - Exit Through The Gift Shop
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Film
- Hits: 1995
An unexpected (although scheduled) day off, and so I took the boy to see the new Banksy film - Exit through the Gift Shop.
Which is an informative documentary about graffiti and street art in general. About art in general. And, in a perverse way, about art commenting on life and life imitating art. And there are probably a few more things that it was about as well, but to get into it in any depth would be to diminish the surprise.
And there is a surprise. Indeed, for those not too familiar with the contemporary art scene (I'm not, but if I think you're less so than I might pretend...) the ending will be quite the twist indeed, with some genuine laugh-out-loud OMFG moments.
It's absurdly delightful. I'd happily give it 4 and a half stars....I'd a given it a 5 if Thierry Guetta (later known as Mr. Brainwash) had been a better videographer, but then maybe I'd only have given it a 4....
Further Links: 25 of Banksy's coolest murals (another persons list), banksy.co.uk
a body in the Ascension Islands
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Dreams
- Hits: 1812
I'm in the South Pacific somewhere, close to Antarctica, on a tiny island filled with sapphire blue hot-springs .... it looks a bit like the mineral flows in Yellowstone, each terrace deep and filled, small patches of emerald green grass between them...I'm in the hot-springs before shipping back, unwinding, it's beautiful and there's a bigger island somewhere behind me, South Georgia Island or Ascension Island, a name I recall from a whaling book I recently read....
There's a body in the ship, for some reason it's stuffed in a trunk and we have to return it, one of our shipmates who didn't survive the voyage, and in the cabin of the ship, looking in the trunk where he's packed I'm discussing with someone (?? who?) what we should do with the body, we're supposed to return it, but we're discussing burning it, or a burial at sea....we have to pull him out of the trunk first though, and as he's been in there a while it might be messy....
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