A Project For When Your Parents Die.

Have their house demolished and the remains of the house left where the house once stood. It will be a monument to the layered failure of your attempt to forget.

N.B Your sister will probably be a bit annoyed.

I've been thinking about how to erase an image. One image. Nothing iconic, just type 'picture' in to google image search, take the first one, and think about how you would go about erasing it.

I would approach the owner of the website, and ask them to remove it. Then approach Google, and ask them to remove it from their cached version of the web page. Then find the maker of the image, and ask them to remove it from their computer. Even if they agreed to these ludicrous requests, I would then have to find all the other websites that copied the image, and then begin the laborious process of finding all the parts of the image (probably from online image banks) and asking for them to be removed. I would have to find everyone who has worked on the web-page containing the image and somehow make them forget it, or at the very least never talk about it. And then I would have to somehow forget it (and delete this piece of writing).

-To remove an image from the world would be a great action.

-Everything is an image of everything else.

-That which cannot be burnt must be buried.

Schizophrenic on the Bus

[tuneless whistle] What ever happened to the likely lads?

{pause – repeat x 3}

oooooh (posh voice) Go away

Late night traffic,

Late night traffic,

Night time traffic.

[low mumering] Come on!

[tuneless whistle]

/gets off the bus, can be seen from the window walking slowly away from the bus stop/

I've just plopped out a perfect sphere. Unlikely I know, but in my line of work not impossible. Chance is a wonderful thing. The odds are against the miraculous, but take the long view and everything is inevitable. What would have been incredible is that no-one would ever do a circular shite. This is just another passing moment on the horizon of the now.

Saying that, I did not expect the poo to begin making the sound that it began to make. It emitted an irregular, high pitched beeping. I would have thought that poopers would hum like a giant bee. Maybe they would make a squelching tone like a flanged out, pitched down, fuzzed up bass guitar.

I flushed the fucker anyhow. I have no time for this, I've done four shits today and each one of them was as likely and as unlikely as the other. I sneer at the spectacular, am bored by the brilliant and struck wooden by the wonderful.

That is until I run out of toilet paper.

I went to the National Gallery a few weeks ago and wandered around the pre-Renaissance rooms. The essential wrongness of the proportions of the baby Jesus always fascinates me. These painters were influenced strongly by the Byzantine relic painters. Here is a great example of Jesus looking like a character from a mid 90's teen film at their first Toga party, but shrunk down to the size of a little baby.

Jesus is immaculately conceived, and after initial teething problems, Joseph is persuaded to act as the Christ child's Father, in lieu of the real Baby-Daddy; God. His presence is felt only in the production of the fully formed man child.

Much like the crap film 'Look Whos Talking' (1989).

Look Who's Talking (1989)

These Byzantine images of Jesus as 'Weird-Man-Baby', invite us to speculate on the nature of the infant Jesus, and the possibility of a dual existence, consisting of both God and man. Just as Bruce Willis' voicing of the character, 'Mikey', in Look Who's Talking allow us to conceive of the paradoxical duality of the infant/adult.

Mikey comes out screaming, but unlike a normal child, he is aware of why he is screaming. He knows that the womb is the last safe place he will ever be.

The Weird-Man Baby-Jesus is silent and composed, which is fuelled, rather than tempered by, his knowledge that he will be brutally murdered for his revolutionary Judaism.

The Renaissance painters work out that babies might possibly look a little bit different from adults, and begin to represent Christ as a proportionally correct infant. Baby Jesus loses self-consciousness. He becomes a real baby, without knowledge of the future. Now Baby Jesus is invoked as an impotent child, whose only features are his failure to understand human nature, and the naive sadness that this brings.

Unfortunately, with Look Who's Talking Too, any possible analogies are stunted by the introduction of a character voiced by Roseanne Barr, who represents nothing.

Look Who's Talking Too trailer (1990)