Art For Sale

Wednesday 10 August 2011

When We Were Fab

A little taste of my new short story now available on Amazon Kindle at http://www.amazon.com/When-We-Were-Fab-ebook/dp/B005GFM6L0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1312991485&sr=8-1

That year was the first year I made any real money. How much? Well, yes, values change don’t they? But a lot! It had begun to pour in. OK, I couldn’t have bought the biggest house in London or a major island in the Caribbean or anything like that. But basically I could do pretty much anything I pleased that summer.

I could have gone to Australia for weeks on end staying in the best hotels. I could have gone anywhere in the South Pacific for a couple of years without a problem. I could have taken two of the very finest hookers to The Riviera for the season and that would also not have been a problem.

So, to all intents and purposes I was loaded. Plus I had no ties. I could do what ever I wanted. After all the effort and disappointments of the last few years the feeling was heady. I was young but I can still remember thinking it was a special feeling and a special moment. I was free!

The strange thing is…when you are free what do you do? I was spoilt for choice...

See more at http://www.amazon.com/When-We-Were-Fab-ebook/dp/B005GFM6L0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1312991485&sr=8-1

Monday 8 August 2011

New Artworks for Sale on Saatchi Online

Toto in the Snow Series

See more at http://www.buy-art-for-sale.co.uk/

Monday 13 June 2011

The Brilliant Actors From "The Killing" (Forbrydelsen in Danish)

I don't know if you saw The Killing from Denmark on BBC4 but it was absolutely brilliant. The best thing ever seen on British TV. This clip shows two of the actors in very different roles. The lady in the pink dress is Ann Eleonora Jørgensen who played Pernille and who must be the best actress in Europe and the man in the gown is Lars Mikkelsen who played Troels. And what a lovely setting for a play this is....Click here to see the clip

Wednesday 23 February 2011

Over Rated Classics - On The Road by Jack Kerouac

The BBC recently ran a series on forgotten classics - books that had been well thought of in their day but had faded from view over the years.

But what about over rated classics? How many books regarded as classics are really not very good and owe their popularity to some kind of special pleading by interested groups. I was forced to recognise this when finally getting round to reading On The Road by Jack Kerouac. The truth is...it is quite a tedious book and not at all what I expected.

I had always been led to believe that here was a letter from the other side: an untutored but naturally talented voice from a way of life way outside the conventional life that you and I lead.

It turns out that the Kerouac figure is actually quite conventional. The "story" is little more than "what we did on our holidays". Kerouac lives with his aunt and receives some kind of GI pension which he saves up so he can go to California from the East Coast.

To be authentic he really should have been a bum (albeit a clever bum) riding the railroad with no means of support and no home totally free from the rules and conventions that trammel us everyday folk.

But no! He sets out to hitchhike but fails miserably so he walks back into the city and gets a bus. This takes a lot of his money so he wires home to his aunt to send him some more. Sounds a lot like my university days...which were not very exciting.

And talking of university, the only real action is him hanging out with Dean Moriarty who basically gets drunk, smokes dope, screws women and flees when they get pregnant. Sounds a lot like Dirty Pete at Leeds University. And, frankly, you could get enough of Dirty Pete.

The only thing I like about him is the way he mixes with black people at a time in America when that was not the norm and, in particular, the way he recognises black beauty when that was pretty far from the norm too. Although I notice he never actually has a relationship with a black girl! Sorry...slipping into current PC speak there...never has sex with a black girl.

Which other classics do we think are over rated? Please leave a comment below but don't bother with Virginia Woolf. We all know about her.

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