I was coming home drunk one night when I came across a big pile of bananas in the street. But I didn’t get a very good photograph because it was dark and I was wrecked and too busy being drunkenly amazed by the banana-based absurdity to get a good picture.

Hello Burning Salad. Here I am again. It’s been a while hasn’t it?

And so… the hiatus. Yes well I didn’t really plan that to happen, it was just the way things worked out. I didn’t post for a few days… then a week or so. And I was getting in an increasingly bad mood with the world at large. Then the sort of gnawing feeling I sometimes get when I don’t post for while went away and I just thought fuck it, I’m not going to post anything for a while and who cares. And then I thought maybe I won’t post anything ever again. (This made me feel better). And then I thought okay I better post something to say thanks, goodnight, Burning Salad is no more. But then it seemed better to just wait and see what happened, in case I missed it and decided to post something every now and then.

And then… time passed. And I got a kind of backlog of things that I would normally write about. And I didn’t write about them because starting doing something is always harder than actually doing it.

And here I am. The truth is, I was just getting a bit cheesed off with everything. But who cares about that now. Not I. Hello again.

The preceding three month Burning Salad hiatus will now be referred to as Black Spring. (There are a few Black Mondays out there; a bunch of Black Tuesdays; a Black Wednesday; an unbelievable number of Black Fridays; a smattering of Black Sundays, a clutch of Black Thursdays and more than a couple of Black Saturdays just to round things out).

Well nothing especially out of the ordinary happened during Black Spring but I’ve never really talked about anything out of the ordinary on here anyway, so there a few things worth mentioning. Actually quite a lot of things.

What now follows, in a sort of chrono-illogical order, is the ‘highlights’ of Black Spring…

I was just checking on some Wikipedia pages when I came across this photo of Mark Arm.

What a great picture. Mr. Arm- you win the competition for pictures of men sitting in chairs in their front gardens, hands down.

Valentine’s Day- capitalism gone awry. Again. Trish got a package from her mum (at least that’s what she told me) that contained a small packet of Cupid Corn. I don’t know what’s supposed to be romantic or sexy about corn but it sure does taste good.

I’m no expert on bikes. The only thing I know about bikes is that once you’ve learned to ride one, you don’t need to bother anymore because it’s impossible to forget how. My pal Neil doesn’t agree. He really likes his cycling and is always zooming around on his bicycle. Recently during his zooming around he skidded and fell off and zoomed along on the side of his head instead.

By a crazy stroke of luck, a neurologist and a nurse were in one of the cars behind him and they stopped and tended to the dazed Neil who went to hospital and had his smashed head patched up. The only sign of permanent damage is that he still wants to zoom around on his bike. He’s got balls. And a scar.

Ouch!

And so I have returned from the land of meat and beer. Good old Germany. I got there okay in the end (plane-plane-train-train-train) although if it wasn’t for a nice Germany lady who spoke English I might have ended up somewhere completely wrong. And then second I stepped off the train it started snowing and I had done my usual and assumed that anywhere outside of Scotland has better weather and not really prepared for it not being. But it wasn’t really that cold.

The space was really good- large and in a slight L-shape, with a couple of sliding walls. Felix, the gallery man was very nice and looked after me well. I took over two paintings, a hexagon construction, some drawings and a bag of materials.

I decided to do a wall drawing on one of the walls and it worked out really well because one of the sliding walls had a slight step in it where one part slid behind the other; and I decided that that was good place for it. And it was. Depending on what angle you were looking at the drawing from, it caused a sort of perspective error which is what I was after.

So yes, it was good. I also ate some of the best pretzels known to man.

I’ll add some photos and installation shots to the gallery when I get them sorted out but in the meantime, here are a few images. (It might take a minute for the page to load). You can also see some images at the Raum 45 site.

read more...

I saw this in Aldi when I was in Germany. Who needs Red Bull when you can have a Big Pump?

Hello new years day. I am very hungover and it's okay because so is the rest of the world. I was round at Lorna and Neil's place lat night and then went over to the party at Nick's. I ended up drinking etc. right through the night.

Bang goes another year.

Time for another round up of Burning Salad errata. Here are a few things that I didn't post about at the time...

1. The moustache. Experimental facial hair that it was, I kind of liked it. So did some other people who said, Oh I like the moustache. And then when it was gone, Aw, you look good without the moustache, I never really liked it. My girlfriend was not one of these people. She hated it all along. All in all it had something like a three month run on my ugly mug. Ex-moustache, I salute thee.

2. Walking dogs. I have been walking a couple of dogs for a wee while now. My contempt for the canine is absolute. Dogs, I hate you.

3. Man buys machete. It's true. I saw a man buying a machete. He did it really casually like he was buying a houseplant or something.

4. Pop Star Porn. In order to protect the innocent (and guilty) I'll have to be a tad circuitous about this one... I found a magazine that belonged to a friend that had pictures of naked ladies in it. So I cut up some pictures of some people in a popular band and pasted them in said magazine in a semi-ambient fashion. Then I replaced the magazine and forgot all about it. The resulting psychological shock came a few months later.

5. Punching Pigeons. On Glasgow's Buchanan Street you have to go down a slight slope at the top. In certain weather conditions at a certain time of day, you can find yourself walking straight into the sun as it reflects off of a lot of wet Starbucksy surfaces. There are often a lot of pigeons there too. Often they take off and fly up the street at head height- or at least my head height. On more than one occasion I've had to duck very quickly at the last minute to avoid what would have almost certainly been a pigeon in the face. Anyway, all of the above happened to me one day apart from the ducking part. I was in a bad mood and without thinking about it I ducked to the side and went for the airborne pest. And I caught it with a short jab at close range. The bird flapped a bit and flew away and a few people stared as if I had just spat on an old lady. I didn't care though because it was a good shot and I had just fulfilled a long standing ambition.


Anyway, here are the full versions of the above nonsense. Remember there's some porn here, just in case you're at work (and you don't work in the porn industry). read more...