Boards
is this funny?
Approaching G15M Gallery on the achingly cool Vyner Street, I'm late. Tabatha was late meeting me for a soya latté on Broadway Market. "Why are you late?" I asked. "Sorry darling, Simone my cat-sitter was late. Then I realised someone had stolen my fixie from outside my flat. The cunts. I literally left it for six or seven minutes outside my front door as I went back to re-edit my already heavily-edited video projection piece which I'm screening at Jakob's thing on Friday at Sychadia- you're coming yeah?" The poor thing. Life does seem to be throwing Tabs some sideays shit of late. Last week she crashed her vintage fixie into a group of children visiting Hackney City Farm. And last month her boyfriend left her for another man, the same week her dad left her mum for another man. The same man, it turned out. "Men", she seethed to me importantly as she rummaged for menthol filter tips in her white linen shoulder bag.
A fat mother pushed her pram past our alfresco table as we sat at Broadway Market. I think she tutted as she waddled past. What does she expect? Go in the road like everyone else, greasyface. I need to have my video camera, mic boom and six tripods of various sizes with me at all times, you know, they're not here just for show. I might capture something. Something real. Not like all these other pretenders walking round with credit card sized digital cameras. You can't expect to capture a moment of east end London somethingness without a) a tripod, b) a generator and c) holding up a family of Bangladeshis in a Fiat Punto whilst I mince around getting the right angle.
Man, I hate these phonies. As my ex-tutor at London College of The Organic Arts said: A photograph is not a document unless you've scoured the internet for three hours to find the right kind of out-of-print '68 lomax sepia film produced in a tiny organic community factory thirty miles out of Rome. Where the workers produce the film by listening to Brian Eno backwards whilst taking skateboard "thinking time" breaks every half an hour. You just can't, yeah. No self-respecting self-satisfied Will Self with a shelf life of more than thirty minutes is going to take a documentary-maker like me seriously if I'm kitted out up to the nips with the wrong bloody kit.