There goes another one of those weeks where I don’t post anything. My excuse is simple: I have been playing The Sims 2. For anyone who might not know, it’s the best ( and best selling) computer game of all time. And it is more than slightly compulsive. And so most of my computer time has been sucked up by guiding my sim through his virtual existence. Look Horace, life is like… a wobbly jelly. With some vodka in it. might be what I would say to him if he were real. But he isn’t, which is just as well because life was treating him really well (...job as a getaway driver...sleeping with a couple of girls from across the street...getting quite good at painting...) until I ‘mismanaged’ his lifestyle slightly and he collapsed from exhaustion on the kitchen floor in the middle of the night. Luckily the maid found him in the morning but before she could help he just died right there on the linoleum. Oh well, nevermind. I’ve got a new wee virtual man living in my computer now and I’m not going to encourage him to do as many stupid things as the last one. I might even post some pictures or videos of his hijinks.

Anyway, back to the real world. (The boundary is holding up). I was reading Plan B Magazine this morning when I noticed an advert for an album called Alice In Ultraland which seems to be something to do with Future Sound Of London who I seem to remember as being astoundingly average. But what is was that really caught my eye was the artwork for the album. Let me explain…

When I left my last flat I didn’t exactly end up on good terms with the landlady. And while I would be the first to admit I’m not exactly a meek God-fearing Christian, me and my flatmates at the time weren’t exactly the tenants from hell she seemed to think we were. (Who knows, maybe when she dies and goes to hell it will be filled with people minding their own business, reading books, listening to music and wondering when the fuck the landlord is going to do anything around the place- like put a kitchen in for example). But I digress… The flat had belonged to her sister who had sadly died. And sadly left us with a lot of sad furniture and even sadder ornamentation. So the flat was basically storage for all of her dead sister’s crap and we were the people renting out the remaining space. Oh, the horror of it all. Every inch of storage space was packed full of the most dramatically tasteless shit. And we got all of this static from her because she thought all of our stuff was the junk.

Anyway, across the landlord/tenant that’s-the-junk/no-this-is-the-junk battlefield only one artifact bridged the gap… It was one of those old mass produced, slightly psychedelic pictures made out of some kind of shiny metallic stuff that looks like it might have impressed some far-out fools in its day. But there was something about it that I liked, so I hung it on my wall. And I genuinely liked it, not in some ironic ah yes, it’s so bad that it’s somehow really good way- it just had something actually good about it; so, on the wall it stayed, the whole time I was in that flat. I liked the image because it was simple and graphic and quite poetic in an idealistic and naive kind of way. And it was visually interesting because although elements of its form had dated really badly like the shiny metallic effect, it held within it a sort of very basic stab at beauty. (In a mass produced way). I’m not trying to say that it’s great or anything but it’s definitely got something good about it. And so I stole it when I left.

One thing that really amused about it was the artist’s name etched in the bottom corner. It just said Michelle Emblem in polite looking letters. Michelle Emblem became a kind of in-joke with me and, well, me. I would often wonder who the mysterious Michelle Emblem was, or had been, and what she was doing now. Maybe she had emigrated to New Zealand in the seventies where she carves ornamental sea birds from rare bark to this day; or maybe she pushed the envelope too far and died lonely in a mental institution; or maybe she never even existed, she was just a figment someone at a mass produced picture company’s imagination, who was also called Michelle and dreamed of being an artist.

So when I moved into the flat I’m in now, it was the first thing to go on the wall. In fact, it’s the only thing on the walls apart from a mirror.* There it hangs where I marvel at it every day briefly on my way to the kitchen.

Okay, so I’m flicking through Plan B this morning when I turn the page and blink in amazement when I see my Michelle Emblem picture shining out of the page. I was agog. So Michelle, if you happen to be reading this because you Googled your name, I think someone somewhere owes you some royalties. And I like your picture.

*For some reason people seem amazed that as an artist you don’t fill your living space with your own work.

Apologies for the photo quality- Michelle’s work is too fancy for the camera to handle.

And here’s the appropriation…