not books

I reckon I must have kept notebooks from about the age of 13 until a couple of years ago. Somehow at that point a personal notebook seemed less important. Maybe these blog things were the surrogate. Anyhow, I still find these things knocking about occassionally and flick through them. (Before sticking them in the bin. I know. It's brutal. Creative destruction.)

Unfortunately, they don't have the comic cringe factor of Richard Herring's adolescent notebooks so I can't make a stand-up career out of reading them. They do contain the odd gem in them. One thing I always did was draw. Not from real life but instead of painting, photographs or by pausing a DVD and drawing the still. I liked the way which a picture or a piece of art revealed itself when you forced your hand and eye to follow it.



Then a bit later in my notebooks there are lots of these.



guides from the darkroom. Hours spent mucking about: burning and dodging.

Glastonbury: the invisible city

Robin tells me 'I spend a lot of time thinking about being at Glastonbury when I am not here'. Likewise, I think I will spend much of the coming year drifting through it's fields.

Glastonbury is not the name of a festival but a city that emerges from its visitors' dreams and desires for one week each year. As walked through the festival site for the final time, at about six am on Monday, it was covered in an ethereal, thick fog. It seemed that this place was already losing it's material form and returning to dream and memory.


(C) David Foster 2010

no more football related posts... ever.

numbers from the people

Umbro's 'Tailored in England': Instead of spending millions on a campaign showing David Beckham shooting an Ewok (or something) why not show the glory of Beckton, Bow, Wortley or Wallsend. You can kinda see why England's best players have come from these places... Basically there was fuck all else to do but play football in the car park or down the recky.

http://www.umbro.com/englandwalls/


Good luck lads for tonight. I'm hoping for a semi-final, at least.


Umbro's campaign also reminds me of Lee Friedlander's excellent 'Letters from the People'. A symphony of unbound phonemes.

library

I've been working in a library which has the rare luxury of too much space. The result is that endless volumes of journals sit on the shelves instead of being hidden away in the stack below.
Presumably many of these will never be read again. So this is my elegy for all these hours of study.






(C) David Foster 2010

photocopier malfunctions

syllabus



technique

(c) David Foster 2010

screen grab