They've found a landing site.

This is just 3 in the last few weeks, i find so many -  some come tagless, i imagine, lost let go of by accident catching a breeze and taking flight to get popped by thorns, caught in trees and snared on fences somewhere on the farm. A silver one i met once, one winters day had a small amount of helium left and was slowly beautifully floating, ribbon in tow, across the top of ploughing. Occasionally they come with messages - "if found please return to ? and perhaps we will win the competition." I never hear so i presume we never do.

The latest, was the red one below. Found burst at the rivers edge, when i was looking for sheep. I went to photo it, as i do them all, and only then noticed it had a fine felt tipped message drawn over it. I could only make out one side - A smiley face and then a post code - WA8 7XG. I thought Warwickshire, not that far really from me, mostly they never come far, the ones with messages at least, who knows about the others? But when i turned it over to look for more it was

shot through. At home Mum and I searched the postcode, but it was a whole street, we needed a precise address. We got the sellotape out and stuck it all gently back together. Finally we revealed the message  -  I'm Leah Ella + Ruby if you find plz send us back. Then no more. We looked at Google maps, we did a Street View, we searched for the nearest school or community building, we wondered who might know that   Leah, Ella and Ruby were missing. Nothing was obvious.

WA8 7XG is in Widnes near Liverpool. I am in South Lincolnshire, a 133 miles apart by car - its made a huge trip this little balloon, the furthest of any i've ever found. But where do i send them, will the postman know, will the man at 34 know his neighbours and will he be like us - keen to get the news of their find announced.... i dont know what to do, should i call the paper, the police, can facebook help?

 
So why is this my off the beaten track - because of what I said to Mum as we tried hard to see a clue  - who'd have thought we'd be looking at a strange street in Widnes this afternoon because of a balloon.

Returning to the blog

It's strange returning here to write. Old blogs act as dairies found in the cupboards, aid memoirs to a vague set of sedimented truths, filling in the gaps where imagination and conjecture have been allowed to grow. What strikes me here is the change in technology - all the photographs were taken on a phone, the Nokia K70. This was Nokia's top camera phone but it wasn't a devise, I could not do decent video I could not be distracted by spam email or one of my children"s posts on Facebook from Indonesia. An app was not really a thing, the mobile phones primary use was to talk to people.

 Off the beaten track in the cemetery walking my dog I consider what would be a change of my behavior, I always look and listen, I take a breath from the list of things I have to do, I ring my mum in a moment of quiet regret for not visiting her more. Perhaps I talk to Kate about our days of work, keeping the pragmatic at bay so we can enact something interesting. The walking of our dogs in the respective spaces of our lives connecting through a device, like a form of distance viewing, connecting both digitally and through a state of mind engendered by habit and our aging dogs need for exercise.

 I also think about writing, that careful process of meaning making that is so difficult, that flow of disconnection that allows us to say something, different things to different people. The rain on the leaves captured on the phone, the pausing, the noticing, the desire to go and get my better camera, the shotgun mike that would cut out the children"s voices from the distant adventure playground. The moving of the phone far enough away from my face so the microphone cannot pick up the sound of my breathing, the desire for a tripod to create the "Lock off shot" the symbol of the art film- the attempt to signify art in the method not in the thing.

Three years ago I would have attempted a Haiku :-

 summer rain,dry leaves
clearing the graves of weeds
 rain beats it's rhyme.

 The turning away from my normal route, the search for difference here was not so much a physical journey but a recognition that my phone was like a blog, a collection of clips and images that would fill the gaps of imagination and conjecture, The sound of new rain on dry leaves, like the creaking of the ice flow on the reservoir becomes a short clip of video on my phone, not a Haiku or a sedimented memory, not a story or a trace, not a feeling or a desire- perhaps it is all these and none of them. On a recent trip to Florence stood in front of the birth of Venus I am pleased to capture an image of an image of an image, I am pleased, the painting is dirty the images vibrant.

lost

You are right to wonder at us being lost or at least digressing from off the beaten track. And yes our initial intention was to go places we dont normaly go and see what we find. Its that sometimes by taking small side steps I find things that relate to the post or at least make me ponder a current thought or make me want to put them up here, just cause they make me laugh or no one else would get it. perhaps we need a sub section called "finds on route" or something, which these small elements can be held in. I still think there is milage in doing proper 'off the beaten tracks' its just that i sometimes dont have the time and i come across stuff on regular known paths.
I like that our blog meanders and then rears a question and we rein it in or just let it go and see what happens. We i think thought by doing this blog we would find sites of study or interesting places , as a tool for us to look at places differently rather, to notice things because we are looking - a bit like your cat ice photo, you were open to looking differently at the world and found something. This for me is sometimes enough rather than always trying to find something big. I like my altered perception, my affected looking. Can or is this enough, or are we at a point to reflect, consider and alter. I suppose its a bit like the question of why 7 in seven sights, each network has to build, and not just keep repeating itself. Do you think we need another person who pokes and challenges and interjects in our blog? or should we make the effort to off road. I like that you started to make work or interventions in relation to the off roading. Perhaps we should explore this idea further?

I have no picture for this post but I do have title of a book A field guide to getting Lost, by Rebecca Solnit. I like it and it fits.

Cats and lambs

Your Christo post reminded me of the idea I had to author events as work. The idea for a the false rock in the peaks was sort of trying to do this - take a series of events and through doing your own continuation claim the previous events as art - or perhaps get people to look at the events differently.

It is hard to see the wrapped up sculpture as anything but art - it is a good tool to talk about intention and artists in the role of art making but I have a cold and cannot really be arsed. I'm not sure why pylons are a symbol of modernism but clearly your chopping them up in pylon field and making them into stairs is very post-modern but maybe again we need to talk about intention.

Ask your dad if he was making a post modern statement or just making do. We are straying off the beaten track in our intention to stray off the beaten track maybe the idea has run out of puff -needs to change into something else- or perhaps we needed to talk about different things which brings me to the cat and the lamb. There is something about things which look like something else which is funny and somehow important in terms of image and cognition. I am going to look and see if there is anything written about it anywhere- hedgehogs which look like yams and squirrils which look like potatoes. Here is ice melting which looked like a cat when I first walked past it then I circled around and it had melted to look like a lamb.

moore/christo/anti NF

As a further response to the 'response to modernism is this postmodernism' theme brought up by the pylons, i also wanted to post this image. Its not off the beaten track - just outside Leeds Art Gallery.
Its the Henry Moore reclining nude, wrapped, in a not trying to be christo but being christo way. I was working at the gallery and went out at lunch and the council had wrapped all the sculptures, some in white, some in blue and some others i saw as i drove home in green.



It was they said to protect them from the anti BNP march the following day. I got excited went back into the gallery saw one of the nice warden guys and said without knowing it a large scale public art intervention was occuring right outside, and that the council had unknowingly provided the gallery with a set of Christo wrappings. He replyed in an unexcitied manner- "Oh, its not as good as the fact they've sawn the xmas tree down, that they put up last week, a gift from sweden, so that next week when it goes back up it will be 2 foot shorter."

Also on the first photo youll see chalk drawings. the body outline on the right says katherine, the stick man says anorexic, both done by the jumpy boys and skaters - the gallery doesnt like that they do drawings ! For me the moore, christo, stickman combination is genius - the gallery didnt agree.

post-modernist pylons - perhaps

Well only on here could i reply with 4 chopped down pylons waiting for reconstruction into legs of a shed - does that mean these are potential post-modernist pylons?!
Also you'll be pleased to know my new stairs for the shed are made in part from a 5th pylon that was deconstructed for re-use.
What i really like is that these pylons come from field that is called pylon field, but now it has no pylons yet we still call it pylon field, which makes no sense to anyone new when you say - im off to pylon field -you know the field that had the pylons but doesnt anymore.
When they were taking them down i met one of the men working for the elec board who on seeing me driving a tractor after working in the field, decided i might be a good catch - farmers daughter, some acres, could be well off and no obvious sign of a wedding ring, asked if i was married, because if not he would be interested and that he had a few acres in ireland and wouldnt that be good? I said thanks for the offer it sounds ok but i was quite happy here, so he offered me the pylons as a goodwill gesture instead because he wasnt really meant to. Fair deal i say.

Urban sites

The foxes stick is so rural I wanted to come up with an urban equivalence but I could not find one maybe I need to keep it in mind and I suppose my posting is sort of about things been buried in the snow.

I had a forced digression this week as I can't get my car out so I had to go to a school on the bus. I rang them and found out I had to catch a 69 outside the wicker chemists which is an all nighter and the place of choice for people to get their methadone.

I slipped down the road in the ice and ended up talking to a bloke at the bus stop for about 25 minutes. he kept shouting "I'm waiting for a bloody 69" he seemed to be vocalising for the whole bus queu- the buses were all running late. He told me his really sad life story in a disjointed drug riddled way but there had been love and family and a life that he had lost. I don't think he was really telling me his life story he was just talking and I was there. Anyway I got on the bus and chose not to sit with him and he asked an old lady how much it was to stay in a b and b and she said she had a house and didn't know.

After the school I had to walk home as the buses had all stopped and I had to cross a massive roundabout near meadowhall. There were loads of underpasses but all the paths were covered in snow and there were no footprints - it felt very un-pedestrian. it felt weird so I took a picture and the whole afternoon felt like a forced digression so I thought I should post it. When I emerged from the underpass I tried to find something to photograph and Kate Pahl had told me that pylons were a symbol of modernism so I took a picture of one. I suppose it is something we take for granted and the snow reminds us that perhaps we need to be careful what we take for granted and how quickly things can change.