GIRL IN A SUICIDAL LANDSCAPE

'I trust my little piranha is having an enjoyable day.'

My mate, Ian Brown, swaggering down Bayswater road in a pair of red-black-and-white trainers.

I am my second week in to buying The Times on a daily basis - I do it for the free books. And while normally I would hastily flick through the 'news' section from today onwards I have resolved to dash it straight in the bin cos that's where it belongs! On second thoughts I shan't, I shall select the most ridiculous headlines and post them on here.

And today's winners are:

'Ever wondered why we drive on the left but stand on the right? Step back to the 1920s' One word: What?

'Condom and Pill share equal place in women's affections' Ten years ago a headline like that would only have been acceptable in Sex Trade Weekly.

'Brown: it's chock chip' Frankly the only headline I ever wanna read about Gordon Brown is: 'Brown: I quit!' and not about his preferred variety of biscuits.

Gloria Hunniford wearing an offensively bright orange jacket while being filmed behind Ted's Veg Stall in Whiteley's .

Tom Parker-Bowles biting his fingernails.

'She likes drinking, smoking and fucking. In that order.'

Finally the day has dawned when media darling, and byproduct of the stringently, commercialised, shallow turn of the millennia, Damien Hirst has fallen from grace. The national press has almost unanimously declared Hirst a fraud as he opened the doors to his newest and most inexorably arid, self-indulgent and boorish artistic realization at the classical Wallace Collection.

Having ran out of ideas, pickled livestock and bedazzled human remains he presented a series of 25 paintings under the appellation 'No Love Lost, Blue Paintings'. Standing proudly beside two of his works encased in ostentatiously aurelian frames, with his marmot eyes snug behind the 2mm lenses, Damien perorated: 'They're all by me!' At least he had the balls to own up, because, by God, I know I wouldn't have done. The paintings ripe with trifling trademark signifiers of mortality such as skulls, cadavers, ashtrays and sharks, floating aimlessly on midnight blue backgrounds mapped out with a mesh of perspective lines looked, to paraphrase the great Robert Hughes, like tacky secretions of an overzealous neophyte. The metaphors for these works seemed equally as gauche as their execution, but then Hirst was never really an artist but rather a vainglorious profiteer who made his name turning marinated bovine in to cash cow so I suppose I should have lowered my expectations a dash.

The show comes complete with a fully-paid-for gallery refurbishment including silk drapes commissioned from Marie Antoinette's preferred manufacturers at a cost that would leave most of us and our descendants in debt. For years artists died in penury usually syphilitic, earless, doped-up and without acclaim. Now, however, they are multi-millionaires, who employ people to mass produce their art in factory workshops before putting it up for sale at Saatchi...but whatever, this is progress I guess.

Personally, I never understood, nor saw, shock value in any one of Hirst's attempts. I mean the Pre-Raphelites had it, the Modernists had it, even Picasso had it in his own way, Hirst, however, like the rest of the very prolifically pointless Brit Art brat pack never had the capacity to shock simply because he has never conceived an original idea in his life. All the debris he has ever produced, in an attempt to test the parameters of decency and good taste, is a result of shameless appropriation and thereby founded on regurgitations of something someone else had done years ago. Thus regardless of how Hirst fashions his latest collection the paintings lack substance, appear irresolute, unassertive and cautious suggesting uncertainty on the painter's behalf. Stylistically they've been compared to Francis Bacon, which is of course absurd. These optical monstrosities have not a dash of virtuosity, in fact Hirst's botched attacks on canvas are outside the range of mediocrity; they are inexpertly derivative, their execution's poor, they're awkward and monotonous and view like turgid doodles of an anxious first year arts and crafts student.

The exhibition next door to the Wallace Collection's rooms of Old Masters such as Titian, Rembrandt, Poussin, Fragonard, and Gainsbourgh was chosen, I expect, to elevate the importance of Hirst's solo project. And in a sly underhand dig at his contemporaries Hirst explained his choice of location, by claiming: 'you get a bit bored of modern art galleries', yet I feel he had more grandiose motives than that, namely glaring self-delusion in a fit of which he made himself believe he's worthy in the great tradition, among the Masters which is,of course, yet another fallacy. Similar to the one which wants us convinced that Hirst is in some way a protege of Bacon...hilarious methinks... But never mind the fetor of mendacity Damien take heed of this and, please, give up the day job: 'Drowning is not so pitiful as the attempt to rise,' and furthermore, 'You're dead son, get yourself buried.'

Oh and CUNT.

Promenading along Portobello Road we stop by a stall packed with archaic gewgaw. Scrutinizing the rubble, I say to my better: 'These fossils look man-made to me.'
The corpulent termagant behind the stall looks at me bemused and informs me that her husband is an archaeologist. 'Yeah, I say,and my husband is a great big official in the government, ready and willing to knock out all those pretty front teeth of yours.'

Just a touch of evil...

How do you like your eggs in the morning? Unfertilised?

Shielding myself from the acid drizzle with the Metro whilst running down Berwick Street I spotted a headline above my bonce which read: 'Grandpa Stalin wasn't a killer'. Oh interesting, I though, and stopped under some fortuitous scaffolding to read on. Apparently, Stalin's grandson, a decrepit money hungry nonagenarian, has launched a legal battle against Novaya Gazeta claiming it had libelled old Josef. Imagine that...30 million dead and the man's not a killer...How many lives must a man take, before you call him a killer? The answer my friends, is blowing in the wind etc etc.

I'm a florist by trade, the nosegay's for your funeral.

Sitting anxiously on a discomodious polypropylene chair and perusing one of those consummately fascist-fashion magazines, to pass the hour, while awaiting to be called in for my 6:45 appointment, I snarled and fawned at numerous depictions of women lacking any vestige of verisimilitude whatsoever. And while normally I would steer clear of such publications I had little inclination to leaf through Heating & Plumbing Monthly which was the only other option in the rack. And so I flicked from page to page until my eye snagged on the following tag line: How Can You Make Him Get Married?'

Now, is it just me or does that sound so wrong that even mail-order nuptials, contemptible and contrived as they are, seem relatively acceptable in comparison? The article suggested entrapment by cajoling was by far the best course of action while psycho (therapist) Philip Pulman (whoever he is) asserted that 'a little cunning doesn't go amiss' before adding that 'flattery' works wonders with men as they are nothing more than 'praise-seeking missiles.' Sooooo rub the missile up the right way and you might get a Mariachi band, a four-tear wedding cake and a boot up the aisle? Is this right? It just might be, at least the latter part.

I feel so out of touch with the female niche of the market that I didn't even realise such features still featured in modern day magazines. How naive. The three page spread began with a protracted introduction which entailed such jisms as this: ' Bullying, bribery and coercion might work in the short term...persuasion, however, might just tip the balance - especially if you're prepared to stretch the truth and make your point so subtly so that your partner thinks it was his idea in the first place.' No wonder one in four marriages ends in divorce. The article went on: 'Some of the best lessons in manipulation are taught by those in advertising,' and avidly encouraged women to try and 'persuade' their partners by 'using one or more of the of the following five approaches':

Reciprocation - do something nice and he will feel duty-bound to do something nice in return. (?)
Commitment and Consistency - get him to make a decision and he will stick to it so not to appear weak. (?)
Social Proof - show him everyone else is doing it thus he will feel inclined to follow the herd. (?)
Authority - be firm, convince him it's the right thing. (?)
Scarcity - show him that what's on offer is in short supply, and that there's plenty of fish in the sea. (?)

The mantra that followed read thus: 'Practice them! It might seem cold and calculating - but remember that all is fair in love and war.' So basically, the whole idea of romance, which is shoved down our every orifice each February, is not only a corporate capitalistic enterprise courtesy of Hallmark, Cadbury's and florists nationwide but also an utterly redundant concept. I knew that God was dead, but I didn't realise that romance was too. While reading the article I remembered the following lines by Bukowski: 'there's no chance at all: we are all trapped by a singular fate. nobody ever finds the one.' And maybe he was right, but surely the point and the fun and the romance is in the trying? Coaxing someone in to something, anything, especially in to an institution, with vulpine tactics and artifice is abominable but also rather pointless in the long term. Or is it? According to the magazine you can even force your other-half in to having children if you adhere to the above principles. I sat there perturbed and bewildered and realised for the first time why Freud, like almost every other man, couldn't understand women because as a woman myself I do not understand them either. To end, a rather fitting quote by the one and only Mr Beckett: 'Women are all the same, bloody same, you can't love, you can't stay the course, the only feeling you can stand is being felt, you can't love for five minutes without wanting it abolished in brats and house bloody wifery.'

Here, here.

Yeah okay, but can you do this?!

34 BB I presume?

I do like a bit of art now and then, and today seemed like the perfect day for meandering around Tate Britain. Albeit, I'm not a huge fan of Turner and only like a select few of the old masters, I though it worth seeing nevertheless. The exhibition dubbed 'magnificient' by The Times, and reviewed by almost every national rag in the land with the likes of The Daily Telegraph naming Turner as 'one of the greatest painters of all time,' was unremarkable in every aspect. His works - most of them indistinguishable on the verge of identical - are pastiches of elements purloined from the likes of Rembrandt, Claude Lorrain, Jacob van Ruisdael, Willem Van de Velde, Nicolas Poussin and Titian.

According to the national press this particular undertaking made Turner a 'virtuoso' painter 'who looked back as well as forwards'. I disagree, primarily because Turner didn't pay homage by imitating his idols he plagiarised them and that shows a lack of imagination and ingenuity on his part. Conversely, his technique was inimitably his own but his works hanging alongside the likes of Rembrandt and (even) Constable looked like nebulous pasquinades as opposed to bona fide works of a master painter.

Notoriously competitive with his contemporaries for the share of the pie he was very prolific and chose popular subject matter or whatever was considered a la mode at the time: Venetian cityscapes, Shakespearean parables, biblical scenes, mythologies and epichorial allegories all of which were pecuniary endeavours rather than artistic ones. So in essence we know little of Turner's true artistic nature, except for the fact that he absorbed a great deal from the old masters and thereby perfected his technique through ersatz and diligence.

Turner went trough many phases and was very capricious, experimenting with light, tincture, romanticism and emulation but all of his works are instantly recognisable by their glowing mists and beautified but otiose atmospheric emptiness. His works are immensely ambitious, as was Turner himself, but lack individuality which he borrowed from the masters he revered. In short, I personally think, that Turner was a man of potential rather than genius primarily because he never quite dared to paint what his heart desired preferring to emulate and unquestionably following the teachings of Sir Joshua Reynolds who deemed art to be a hierarchy with history painting at the top, followed by landscape, portraiture and genre. In turn, I found most of the exhibition repugnantly grandiose and uninspiring. However, I loved 'A Scene from the Apocalypse' by Francis Danby and 'Rough Sea' by Jacob Van Ruisdael. But above all, I just have to say that George Stubbs RULES!

'I've got the money, you got the fags?'

Anna Karina: 'I've got my eye on you, Luc.'
Jean-Luc Godard: 'And I've got my eye on that fella's ass, Anna'

Robert Frost was the world's first writer-in-residence, in the 1920's, at the Middlebury College in Vermont.