NINA SIMONE'S GUM

I recently read Nina Simone's Gum by Warren Ellis. I enjoyed it profoundly. Like the best books, it told me as many things about myself as it told of the teller and the tale. As I learnt about Warren and his journey with the chewed gum he rescued from Nina Simone's post-concert piano, it provoked me to think deeply about all sorts of past experiences, people and feelings. 

I felt my life-long internal conflict between collecting and possessional anti-sentimentality, that not rages but peters perpetually, stoked.

My daughter is a born collector. Of everything, every scrap of nothing. I love it. This book made me realise that the value is never the object, it's in it being chosen by her. The intangible emotions now stored in an unremarkable pebble that can only really be unlocked and felt by me. The pebble, the scrap, becomes a conduit for the emotional bond between us. And this, of course, is how Nina's gum works, too.
The book also seemed to validate a lifetime of following the shadows of serendipity, of trusting whims enough to be guided by them. Of seeing the connections in our lives, with other people and the things we use and create. And the beauty of these connections and how items, collaboration and individual expertise and knowledge combine with imagination to foster bonds and increase the emotional, even spiritual, resonance in all directions.
I don't hold many, if any, in higher regard to Nina Simone and her work, but although I knew some of Warren Ellis' work with Nick Cave, this book led me to listen to his band The Dirty Three. I'm now immersed in their LP Horse Stories, and it somehow feels right that I've only just found these songs, despite the album being over twenty years old. And so here is sketch of Warren Ellis. I wanted his hands to somehow be prominent. They felt important in the story, of the gum and also his life. Read the book and consider what is precious and why.

ZAHA HADID

Of course I love Zaha Hadid's buildings - I used to work opposite the Olympic Aquatics Centre in Stratford and the Evelyn Grace Academy is in my Brixton neighbourhood - but since becoming aware of her drawings and paintings via a documentary, I've been eager for the chance to see them. The Hadid-designed Serpentine Slacker gallery gives this chance.

Her thought process can be followed from the small sketchbooks to vast canvases on display. Semi-representational but essentially abstract images that might be hard to process without the insight of her prep work and the completed visions of her architecture.  
Endless curved lines and harmoniously scattered blocks of colour. Like plans for a future that never happened. The influence of Constructivism taken to more beautiful places. A piece called London 2066 (shown above, from 1991) looks like a gloriously updated version of the EastEnders titles, with a Vangelis theme tune.

The artworks are the buildings deconstructed, floating and swirling but paused - the VR of 4 of the pieces deconstruct the paintings themselves and the over-lapping formations come alive. I would've liked the option to choose various audio tracks. I wonder how different it would feel experiencing the visuals with doom-laden music or cheerful summer sounds, for example.

Difficult not to be inspired by the flood of ideas that seem to have poured from Zaha Hadid.

RUBBISH PAINTING

The painting shown above was done over a year ago. I didn't like it as I finished it and I don't like it now, so I left it to fend for itself, never collecting it from the exhibition it was part of. This morning I took the long route to work, taking me past the exhibition building, inevitably leading me to wonder at the picture's fate. 

As I walked across the front, I imagined finding it discarded out the back, perhaps a corner poking out from the bins. As I walked past the side, I actually saw the painting leant up against the bins. I wasn't really upset, more surprised - mildly freaked out - that my premonition had happened. Was this odd timing, or had it just been there for months?

I went to look and see what state it was in. Brixton is similar to India in that you can't pause for long before a stranger approaches, and as I was considering weather to leave or reclaim it, a sprightly elderly woman joined me. There was a second abandoned canvas, but she pointed at mine and declared it to be the better. My fragile ego will take any praise, so I admitted responsibility and after a brief chat - she was French, which explained her style and her laughter at my adopted name, and she'd lived in Brixton for 25 years, in a large house close enough for her to point to. 
I offered her the painting. A relief to get rid of it. Her walls were full of art but she'd find some room, she promised. She seemed pleased and it solved the problem of what I would do with it. I'm happy I'll never have to look at it or see it again, yet I do like the idea that it lives on. Even if it becomes a joke, the painting that no-one likes, at least it lives. That's pretty much all the vast majority of us aspire to, isn't it; just keep alive, for as long as possible.
I'll probably walk past her house in a year or two and rescue it from the bins again.