Thursday 28 February 2013

Went to see the Juergen Teller show at the ICA, and it was only when I arrived that I realised it was called Woo! and not Wool, as I had thought until then. This happens to me quite a lot. I often misread burn as bum, which is pretty funny if you are British and childish. The font in which I'm typing this seems reasonably clear, but the EPG on my television is completely ambiguous: Bum After Reading, Bum Notice. Teller is one of those people I can't help surrendering myself to and trusting. He's so open and confessional and off-hand that he seems terribly mysterious. He is not a needy bore, like Terry Richardson, and I imagine he must hate fashion a lot of the time. There are a few self-portraits, of a kind. I suppose it must take plenty of self-confidence to present your anus (but not your face) to the camera while balancing on a grand piano being played by Charlotte Rampling; but it is a funny sort of self-confidence.

Sunday 10 February 2013

I was walking up Church Road on Thursday, past the closed-down newsagent, Hove Newsagents, when I noticed two unhappy-looking men standing in the street ahead. They were facing me, but their heads were bent over something one man was holding in his hands. From a distance it looked like a wallet full of highly-coloured foreign bank notes. They were very absorbed in some sort of complicated discussion in a language I didn't recognise. It all seemed quite exotic, but once I was close enough I realised that they were leafing through a small packet of processed ham, very carefully separating and counting the slices. That is a true story, and I thought it was worth passing on.