Moving moving moving

Sorry for any inconvenience, but this blog will from now on be found at:

http://straylightfoto.wordpress.com/

You can also get there via the "Blog" link on www.stray-light.co.uk

Please update your bookmarks and blog readers, and see you on the other side.

Sloe Learner

Just a digi-snap of what it looks like out the back of my house at the moment. -18C last night, and quite a shock for these usually temperate parts! You know something unusual is happening when people are building igloos in South Manchester...

Being snowbound - and the turn of the year, natch - tends to induce reflection about the year just gone. And, for me, the biggest thing about 2009 was upping sticks and moving to my new house. It's been strange to move much closer to the centre of Manchester, and simultaneously feel like I can have a quasi-rural experience thanks to the huge areas of open country, woods and river just out my back door... One of the products of this has been sloe gin:



A lot of people had bottles of this for Christmas from me this year! As well as the sloes that grow everywhere I've also been able to pick - either growing wild or at communal orchards - apples, pears, blackberries, gooseberries, plums, damsons, cherries and hazelnuts. Hopefully there'll be lots more of this in 2010...

And, as for the whole photography thing... I know 2009 has been, for various reasons, a bit lean in terms of new work, but this year will definitely see a conclusion to the Radium Street project, and at some point some pictures from new series that I'm working on starting to appear here.

Gayn Gone

Goodbye to science lady and model extraordinaire Gaynor - Manchester will be that little bit more gray in your absence.

PS/ thanks to all the bands and everyone who braved the weather and came to the Stray Light. It was a good night.

Xmas Invite

Dark

Capitalism Run Amok

Kat recently noticed that our 2002 album, Careers, is currently going for more than £40 on Amazon. Can I just point out that it is still available for just £6 from here, and there are still quite a few copies ... unlike the last one, Waves Broken, which is well on the way to selling out.

While I'm on the band thing. We're in the middle of writing new material at the moment (going very well) so not much going on otherwise, but we will be playing at The Bay Horse in Manchester on November 19th, and then on December 19th everyone is invited to the Stray Light festive event at The King's Arms. We'll be playing some new stuff, alongside sets from Fat Elvis, Satnam's Tash and Serpentine Pad - and the first 50 people through the door will get a free mince pie baked by my mum!

Photography content = zero

I've just finished reading Thomas Pynchon's latest novel, Inherent Vice. It's actually a nice, quick, light read - like having a scoop of melon sorbet after the four-course banquet of hulking great metanarratives like his previous one, Against the Day (which I'm now reading for the second time and having a whale of a time with).

Anyway, what I've been finding interesting is Pynchon seeming to break his cover a little bit more these days. First it became known that he personally wrote the Amazon blurb for Against the Day, and now he's actually narrating promo videos like the one above. Of course the strangeness of this is kept in perspective by his - and, yes, that is really Pynchon - appearance on The Simpsons:



Two things about this really. Firstly, although - yes - I was fascinated to hear Pynchon's voice, I don't particuarly WANT to know anything about him. These days it's de rigeur for authors, artists, directors to do endless interviews - and I do think sometimes it becomes an intrusion on your experience of books, art, films &c to have this authorial presence looming over the whole thing. To be topical for a moment, does it affect your appreciation of a Polanski film to know that the person who made it went on the lam after molesting a child? In contrast, when I first read Gravity's Rainbow it might as well have dropped from the sky, and I was able to enjoy it wholly as a thing in itself (and, later, as part of a body of work) because the author was, at most, a spectral figure on the margins. I don't think it would have added anything to my experience to know what ol' Tom dresses like, who he votes for, whether he likes Mexican food, or anything at all about his personal life. Maybe the puppeteer should remain behind the curtain.

The second thing is really about people who are very concerned with the opposite of that last point. There are a few articles and films around that - rather creepily - are obsessed with Finding Pynchon. As if he was lost somehow, rather than just someone who doesn't like to do interviews very much. And so, in the absence of an external way of gauging the author's intent you end up with people earnestly suggesting that Pynchon IS JD Salinger, or - very popular at the time - that Pynchon IS the Unabomber.

Anyway, my point - to the extent that I have one - isn't that we should view art as totally abstracted from the people who make it, but just that if, say, you like my photographs it shouldn't perhaps matter too much if it turns out that I'm a jerk in real life...