Tim Turnbull

In the Prospect of Whitby after the Private View Two faaz'n years of culchah, Mickey Nails complains and snorts into his beer. He gazes balefully off down the greasy Thames as the last charter boat plods its way upriver. Water laps around the balcony piles. Astrid says she tought zat some of it vas good. We all agree the painting of the Black and Tan was nicely made. Astrid liked the shed of vegetable tools but Micky thinks the avant-gardists' aspirations far out-stripped their talent or ability to just get out of bed. The self-harmer stroke performance artist's photographs of cuts looked superficial and did not impress us. Harry Fink points out that he has raised much better welts on Shel the crack-whore's arse, while making S & M home movies, and, come to think of it, she made a mess of his. Then he gets maudlin because his artistic output is currently being perused by the Met and not with a view to sponsoring the work. In fact they're sniffing round the Pepys estate to see if all the girls were really volunteers. When the free pop ran out we came in here, flush with cash, for more imported lager, having done a roaring trade in substance with the goateed wonders in the old tobacco warehouse on Wapping Wall. It's laughable. For all the yuppie dockside lofts, the City rich barred up behind their electronic gates, who glide like ghosts, in silver BMW's and Mercs, the mile or so to work, the Prospect still fills up with scum and arty hangers-on, like us, in just the way it's always done. We leave. The Bangladeshi kids, out on the cobbled street, stop their football game to stare at us. They stare as though we're aliens from space, well dressed but walking, coked up and talking too much and too fast and heading upstream to see what the city has to offer. Oh yeah, two thousand years of culture. ********************************************** Not a Committed Artist Tate Modern 14.5.2000 The German boy with the deep-fried tan is pointing in pantomime disgust and shouting out things in foreign. They sound like entartetekunst from here. He has fabulous pecs, slim waist, blond crop and a six pack showing through his starch white vest. It appears that something abstract, and probably expressionist, has got his goat. I follow on, logging his outrage at each of the exhibits, and consider turning back, jogging through the galleries to get ahead, and launching a haymaker aimed a half a yard behind his head, and watching him drop like a lamed horse, blood spraying over the floor as if from Jackson Pollock's brush. I could help him see the world more like Georges Braques and, in the brief hush before the patrons realise that this is not a performance piece and start screaming and call for the police, to understand that modern art is best appreciated in silence - at least when I'm around. His tanned, stupid face yacks into the distance. No. I'm too old and scared of getting banned. I've bin slamming about the place for about six years now I used to be a lumberjack (for nearly twenty years) and now my back hurts and poetry and librarianship seems a lot better option. I have a lovely little dog called Eddie (West Highland White Terrier - not very macho but fuck if you wrestled with trees for two decades I figure you can have any kind of dog you want.)

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