KAIDIE TRANS-MIGRATING? 7
Has Kaidie abandoned her mission/vision/quest for A / The Meaning Of Life and re-incarnated / is re-incarnating into a guide for the Bloomsbury Festival on the topic of Art & Society in Bloomsbury, Nondon??????
KAIDIE TRANS-MIGRATING? 3
With the Queen's Diamond Jubilee around the corner, Elizabeth is often sighted here and there in one form or another.... and so can Kaidie, who also seems to be around the corner (of this snapshot). If so, Kaidie's proved to be the opportunist once again - having previously died for shots with the Wondrous Grayson Perry and Ken Livingstone. To be continued...
** You are invited to the Private View of the Making Space Exhibition 22 February 6-8:30pm WC1H 0AB**
While Kaidie remains dead, she may well conjure up a thing or two at this annual PhD event at the Slade School of Fine Art’s Research Centre in Nondon, UK. In any case, many other artists are involved in this exhibition Making Space, including a few big names. You are invited to the PV on the 22nd, and if you have already acquired tickets for the conference on the 25th, count yourself very lucky. The rather delightful Grayson Perry will be speaking – having caught his very wonderful exhibition at the British Museum recently, coming face to face with the great Perry may well be the impetus for Kaidie to stop playing dead and come back to life.
** GOODBYE 2011, HELLO 2012**
Hello there!
We hope that you have had a fruitful 2011 as we have. Thus far,
1) … approximately 475,000 unique visitors have (allegedly) visited our running blog since 12.12.2009
2) … in our search for the/a ‘Meaning of Life’, we have run at least 6000km in the past 750 days in the primary world, including having completed 2 fool marathons (Nondon, Farnham Pilgrims), 2 half marathons (Safra Bay Run, Uxbridge Grand Canal), as well as other smaller races (Friends of MSF, PAssion), while raising some money for charity along the way (many thanks to many of you who had responded to our emotional blackmail!)
3) … we have made nearly 2500 ‘friends’ on Facebook, including turning some of them into wondrous collaborators (such as Jeremy Hight, who curated us on an online exhibition on Leonardo Electronic Almanac; James Odling Smee who baked us a heart-stoppingly-mind-shifting chocolate cake that sent us on the mostest moistest magnificently heavenly sugar-high; Chico (a many-pawed cat owned by Anji Reyner) who has just passed away from real life, and who is now accompanying us on our astral runs…
… Indeed, we have been dead since 24th of April, when Kai Syng reached her Chinese age of 37, which was a week after Kaidie hit 4:24:37 at the Nondon Marathon 2011. Yet, there is no stopping us from coming back to life (or is there?)! How, indeed, will we spend the final 250 days before we finally hit the bucket on 09.09.2012, on the last day of the Nondon Paralympics? Will we catch Kaidie impersonating a 2012 Nondon Ambassador at the Kings Cross Station come Summer 2012? Before that, will we catch someone who resembles Kaidie as a Cultural Bloomsbury guide on the topic of Art & Society, and running the Bath Half Marathon, KNI Waltham Forest Borough Run, and a midnight sun run in Norway? And, last but not least, will we finally find the/a Meaning of Life? … Boundless questions abound…
Come run our last laps with us.
Happy New Year 2012.
Yours Sincerely,
Kai-die
KAIDIE DIES: Variation 5.
Photograph by the same Trespasser on his mobile phone after he drove Kaidie to an early grave, after he realised that Kaidie was gone, and when he saw Kaidie's corpse, and when he concluded that she was dead, and thereafter carried on with his walk at Jacks Rake, or is it Jake's Rack, while Kaidie continued with her own astral journey/journeys across dimensions.
THANKS TO YOUR AMAZZZING SUPPORT, WE RAISED £1520 FOR SHELTER AND COMPLETED THE 2011 NONDON MARATHON IN 4Hours 24Mins 37secs WITH A PLACE POSITION OF 2132.
Click image to zoom in. Yes, our name on our vest RAN. Moral of our story: DON'T buy fat marker pens that say 'permanent' and 'water-resistant' from Paperchase. They lie.
An open letter to the 47 sponsors of Kaidie’s run for Shelter at the 2011 Nondon Marathon:
Dear Trespasser, Benson, Emmanuel, Wee San, Zadoc, Andy, Umi, Anonymous, Hapless, Veronica, Ateen, Sarah, Chin Hwee, Kelvin, Caroline, Paul, Chris, Michael, Michael, Anonymous, Tim, Marc, Ying Yan, Anonymous, Shea, Laura, Sze Wee, Mirabelle, Christina, Daniel, Yentri, Stephen, Cristian, Diego, Cliff, Laura, Andrew, Sonia, Fernando, Patricia, Kian Chow, Eric, Pei Chi, Hillary, Pei Shan, ‘Your favourite Russian’, and Ben,
Who doesn’t have nights of tossing and turning, flossing and gurning, cold sweat and stiff muscles, sharp pain racing through the knees, swollen fat feet populated by misshapened black and broken toenails (if you are a foot-fetishist, you’re advised to NOT date a runner, or, if you insist on dating runners, you’d better develop other healthier fetishes) and absolutely-not-wanting-to-get-out-of-bed, especially when it is grey and cold, slippery and murky? We do too, and certainly did, but YOUR financial blackmail left us with no choice but to get up on our hefty-dimpled-cellulited- very-very-reluctant arse, and run. Afterall what’s a wee bit of cajoling our toes to stepstepstep on the pavement one step at a time (typical conversation with our toes and feet: ‘Please??? Prettttyyyyyy puuuulllleaasse!?!!! OH GET ON WITH IT WON’T YOU!’), compared to what people without a shelter have to face and live, day in, day out? Trans-dimensional runners as we are (which is our task for the 1000-days of our existence), running is the least we can do, to help raise money for Shelter for its meaningful fight against homelessness and poor housing in the UK.
So, with your generous support, we raised a total of GBP £1520, and on 17 April 2011, had the honour to participate in one of the biggest gigs on earth on our favourite city on earth, the 2011 Nondon Marathon. At a sweltering 16 degrees celsius, we completed the 42km course in 4 hours 24 minutes 37 seconds (which is 1 hour 5 minutes less than the time we took for our first full marathon last year in the hilly offroad course at the very very lovely Farnham Pilgrims’ Marathon, with battered shins), measured on our Garmin Forerunner 405 loaned to us by Urbantick. We are ranked 3484 in a total of 12,229 (lycra-clad and dimpled) female participants, and an WHOPPING 14,914 overall (of a total of 34,656 male, female and other-gendered participants)! Our position for our category (aged 18-39, although we are only 500 days-old in reality) is 2132.
Given that it was a flat route, it felt easy and not sluggish, generally-speaking. The crowd was wonderful, with people shouting our (DIY-marker-penned-NON-water-resistant) name to support us along the route (one girl shouted: ‘Shelter lady! Looking good!’ We shouted – presuming it was us she was referring to??? – ‘Thanks! You don’t look too bad yourself!’), as well as feeding us with jelly babies, oranges, chopped bananas, home-baked cookies and cakes, chocolates and other candies. There were even 2 priests who sprayed holy water (we presume? or some other unidentified liquid) at runners (which we went for and basked in, non-believers as we are, although always opportunistic for a bonus)! Memorable too was a (drunk?) man who positioned himself at the kerb and held out a large plate of CHIPS goading us ‘GO ON, YOU KNOW YOU WANT SOME CARBS!’) We also slapped the extended hands of several kids (SOME OF WHOSE LOOKED REALLY FILTHY!!! What had they been handling!? Eeeeewwwwwww) as well as a couple of adults (Eeeeeewwwwww!). For the first half we kept up at a good speed, and the first 2 ten-kms were completed around 60 minutes, while the last 2 took a little longer, as we worked-in a timeout/lull session, before we went for a faster final 2km (of the 42km route). Our time at half-marathon distance (13.1 miles) read 2 hours 08 minutes (which is 20 minutes faster than our first attempt in a half-marathon in a previous life; we are hence now certain that a next half-marathon can be completed in around 1 hour 55 minutes). We burnt a total of 3186 kcals, and did not take any loo breaks (‘So what?’ you may snigger, but a record for our tiny bladder [and oversized brain, as you our dear reader are well aware]). We ran as a ‘GBR’ person (instead of ‘SIN’), not to mention the ‘Virgin’ (and ‘Money’) tag all over us… It felt HOT HOT HOT for us – imagine what the fancy-costumers had to endure!!! We kept running into one of the Rhinos- and we had read that their costume was more than 18kg. Not one time did that Rhino, or many of the other costumed runners, stopped. They got on with it, step by step. Seeing that, we switched off our pain button for our supercramps that had haunted us the entire week, and got on with it.
What spurred us during the course? 1) Our anger at the enforced feeding and reduced training in the past week (as advised by ‘experts’: ‘taper and carbo-load!’). For 7 days we were so restless we were completely dysfunctional, not to say insonmiac (fearing that we’d oversleep and miss the gig) and murderous (wanting to slaughter runners we run into, out of pure envy) as well. The forcefeeding -of CARBOHYDRATES, NO LESS!- was most unpleasant and traumatic. 2) We found the sight of other wobbly, thunderous cellulite-cum-dimples in hips wider than 62-inch-wide plasma-TV sets IN LYCRA slightly offensive. AND THERE WERE MILLIONS, UNABASHED. Also to spare runners behind us of THEIR eyesore of OUR cellulited plasma TVs (although we were wearing shorts, NOT lycra), we huffed and puffed and kept moving. Like jellies. And the godmother of jelly, baby.
After the race, we attended the party thrown for us by Shelter at the Strand. We enjoyed a most lovely massage given to us by a most lovely Phil (who told us that he was a ‘functional therapist’. ‘As opposed to a dysfunctional one?’, we asked; Phil also said that our ‘IT band’ was tight. Techhy as we are, we are proud to hear that a band – an information-technological one, no less, inhabits our body), had a few glasses of prosecco (of course we would have preferred Champagne, but darling, it’s alright, as we do love bubbles), as well as linguini WITH FOUR meatballs (The race has brought out the carnivore in us!!! The waiter gave us 6 but we donated 2 back. ‘Are you sure??’ ‘YES!’ we cried, and threw his balls back at him, while we rolled ourselves back to our seat)!!! (All these benefits of our £100 entry fee!)
What did we do when we went home? Watch the BBC’s coverage of the event on iPlayer, of course. It is always always moving to watch endurance athletes do their thing. The show put up by this year’s winners was, to say the least, incredible. They were not running 42km – THEY WERE SPRINTING. Those large long strides – powered by their tiny, leanmeanmighty bodies. So you think that only us mortals suffer? As soon as the elegant Emmanuel Mutai came home through the finishers’ line, he stooped, to puke. Bright, yellow, stuffs. Who would have guessed? For, like fellow Kenyan and female champion Mary Keitany, his was a face of resilience and pure focus, from beginning to end. He held court, and got on with it, and won – gracefully. TALK ABOUT ENDURANCE.
After a day of rest and unsettling sleep (pierced intermittently by foreign pains in our knees – and IT bands????), we resumed running (we mean limping) on Tuesday. We have also signed up for 2 races: the Kilomathon (26.2km – YES in our favourite METRIC system!!) on 23 October 2011 in Nondon, and the Bath Half Marathon (21km, or 13 miles) in March 2012. We do enjoy the full slap of 42km / 26 miles, but we think that the twenties are the most suitable. Afterall, we do not have all that much time left in our 1000-day lifespan for hours and hours of training, and we still need to run not only in Life 1.0 (in the primary world), but Life 2.0 (online) as well. We intend to go for a couple more within our lifetime: a warm one, during Winter (Marakkech!) and a midnight sun run (in Norway! Aha!).
All in all, the 2011 Nondon Marathon was a pleasant race. We were fully focused on our given task – the task that you have entrusted us!! We feel honoured and humbled to have been given the chance to run such a big gig in our favourite city on earth, and to have done so for a meaningful cause. THANK YOU to all our sponsors for your generous support for our donation drive for Shelter!!! THANK YOU ALL for your lovely messages of support!
Yours Sincerely,
Kaidie x
PS For our other readers reading this, should you wish to show your support for Shelter, YOU CAN STILL MAKE A DONATION! Click a few clicks here!!
PPS: Dear ‘Trespasser’, if you are reading this, please write us to tell us who you are, for, how could we possibly thank you properly if you do not reveal yourself?
'Trespasser', won't you share with us about the perils of running on the digital highway?
WE JOIN 40,000 TO RUN THE 2011 NONDON MARATHON ON SUNDAY! But NO, THIS IS NOT A RICHARD-BRANSON PRODUCT-PLACEMENT BLOG POST!
1) Running is an immensely popular sport today all over the world, since it can be done anytime, anywhere, and by nearly anybody. 2) Any marathon is a big gig/performance/show (a show of human determination, although nowadays marathons, and even triathlons is such an achievable feat that the genuinely fit ones go for and invent ever more ultra- and extreme races, in impossible landscapes, over impossible periods of time, etc, etc. 4) Nondon is an amazing stage to live/work/play/be (we’ve gone through this before) 5) The Nondon Marathon is a big show on earth alright (Biggest fundraising event on earth! 40,000 runners! Records to be broken The most scenic marathon routes! … …) 6) Nothing – no thing in this world today escapes the supermarket, corporatised treatment/makeover. 7) Richard Branson has never, ever been known to be subtle.
HENCE. Look at these images. Richard Branson’s Virgin has been running the Nondon Marathon in the past years. It’s a huge gig alright – a large advertisement for itself. Yes, do yell it loud and clear, in every which way possible, leftrightcentre, brand us and co-opt us into your game, your rules. Thanks Sir Richard. If the Nondon Marathon Expo at the Excel Centre (MILLIONS OF FIT [healthy] AND FIT [goodlooking] runners, lean and mean and powerpacked in lycra!) is just a small indication of what’s to come on Sunday 17 April at the Nondon Marathon, we are prepared to be even more branded (‘Virgin’ no less!), and be seen with even more products. ‘Pure’ as it is or can be, running, like any other activity today, can be coated in much gunk that threaten to make us forget why we run. (We are not being cynical and dismissing the good work that such a big gig does (raising much fund for charities for one, and we are running for a charity as well), but there are always questions to ask in any such large-scale hyped-up enterprises [Bono, Geldof et al]). It does not have to be like this- our last (and first!) marathon was a much smaller event. The Farnham Pilgrims Marathon in Surrey was quirky and intimate, highly praised by all runners of varying experiences, and was not dunked in excessive institutionalised/corporatised distractions. We have signed up for the Bath Half Marathon in March 2012 (provided if we live till then?), but there are certainly questions to be asked and issues to think about, with regards to the institutionalisation of running – an activity that is, for us, essentially an act of gentle anarchism, a personal act of resistance. It’s an interesting tension. In this day and age no one is not co-opted in one way or another, but the question, we suppose, is how we run (navigate, negotiate, manage) that tension (like we do many things in life, unless we are hermits living in caves). Before we become (hairy/smelly) hermits in caves, we scribble a message on the wall at the Expo. (Thanks ADIDAS!!!!)
UPDATE: THANKS TO MS CHUN WEE SAN, WE HAVE HIT OUR TARGET DONATION OF £1500! This is Wee San’s SECOND donation for our Nondon Marathon effort for Shelter, the homelessness charity! Wee San, an art teacher, has previously also supported our run for the Friends of Medecin Sans Frontieres! THANK YOU WEE SAN! We also want to thank Jackie Claxton for her support, even after we have reached our target! Having reached our target, we have slightly raised the bar to £1600, so keep your donations coming! Click some clicks here to donate, today! We will close our donation page 1 week after the marathon, on 24 April 2011 Sunday.
AFTER WEEKS OF PRE-RACE ANXIETY, SUPERCRAMPS, FORCEFEEDING BUT TAPERING, IRRITABILITY, WE ARE MORE THAN READY FOR OUR RUN. TO FIND OUT HOW WE HAVE DONE on 17 APRIL 2011 AT THE 2011 NONDON MARATHON, COME BACK TO THIS RUNNING BLOG IN A COUPLE OF DAYS. BUILDING IN 1 LOO BREAK (INCLUDING QUEUING UP – no we won’t do a Paula Radcliffe!) WE ARE HOPING TO COMPLETE OUR 42KM BY WEDNESDAY MORNING, OR, IF WE ARE OPTIMISTIC, TUESDAY EVENING. SEE YOU SOON(ER OR MUCH MUCH MUCH LATER)!
30 DAYS TO RAISE THE FINAL £342 FOR OUR RUN FOR SHELTER AT THE 2011 NONDON MARATHON.
It costs £10 to print our name on the vest (£1.67 each alphabet!!) so at the meantime, we have printed our name digitally - free of charge!
Here we are in the Shelter vest that we will wear on 17 April Sunday at the 2011 Nondon Marathon. Thanks to the wonderfully generous support of 38 of you in the past 3 months, we have raised £1158 for the housing and homelessness charity. With your blackmail, we have been training steadily, clocking in 3 hours for 30km. That said, we may reach the destination at 1pm, which is 4 hours after we begin running the 42km, or Tuesday morning at 40 hours after we take off. In the next 30 days, we hope to raise our final £342. This afternoon, STEPHEN WARD, who sells fruits in front of the Goodge Street station and who is also a runner, very kindly donated £10 for our effort! THANK YOU STEPHEN!!
** As we run we try to make sense of what has just unfolded and is unfolding in Japan – and can not yet make sense of the scale of devastation. This was where we lived in a previous life for 3 years, and during when there were constant reminders of the preparation of ‘the big one’, along with countless drills. Yet, no rehearsal or preparation can help us come to terms with what the magnificent destruction. Let us also find ways to help and do what we can: click here to see how we can show our support. **
Come to the SYMPOSIUM AND EXHIBITION 2-4 MARCH (private view 4 March 18:00hrs) SURPLUS TO REQUIREMENTS? Slade School of Fine Art Research Centre Nondon WC1H 0AB. SEE YOU!
Spring hits Nondon as she starts to come face to face with deep cuts introduced by the ConDem government, including to Arts and Humanities in higher education. (Is art a surplus to requirement? Why should anyone moan about cuts to the arts, when so many other more fundamental aspects of living are affected? Are the cuts to the arts justified? Is art a privilege in these economic times? Is art a privilege in any economic times? Is art education a right? Is education a right? Is education a privilege? Is art education a privilege? Is research in Arts and Humanities a right or a privilege? What is the value of such research? How do we measure the contribution of the Arts and Humanities research? … …) Will our Kaidie be a victim of the cuts, or will Kaidie stand/run strong against all adversities and strike back, defiantly? Come and help us decide our next move. We premiere a diptych, here shown under wraps in our humble abode (even though we are neither humble nor modest about our abode, and are merely using ‘humble abode’ as a stock phrase, just as we say things like ‘cotton light’ or ”pitch black’ even if lightness is not cottony and more, say, stony, or blackness is not ‘pitch’, when ‘stitch black’ sounds more, well, intriguing, possibly causing more frission … ). Come to the Surplus To Requirements? exhibition and symposium organised by the PhD students of the Slade School of Dine Art, University College Nondon. We will be at the site to sell our prints to raise the final £405 for our run for Shelter at the 2011 Nondon Marathon, as well as to meet with you, of course. See you at the Private View on 3rd March 18:00-20:00hrs Thursday.
WHY WE ARE RUNNING FOR SHELTER
We exist/live/run, in order to look for the Meaning of Life, and we run not only in real life (what we call ‘Life 1.0’) but online (what we call ‘Life 2.0’), as well as in hybrid realities of mobile Internet (what we call ‘Life 3.0’). As we run across the various dimensions, we call our running ‘trans-dimensional running’ (ASTOUNDINGLY CREATIVE NAMING INNIT!!!). While it would made our lives easier if we only sat at our armchair and desktop too cook up a fabulous tale that works perfectly on paper (and screen), we have taken upon ourselves (how grand!) to take up running in real life as well (big deal!). We reckon that while we are at it, we might as well make it meaningful for others as well (hopefully, although we [think we] harbour no delusions of self-aggrandisement as to how much our existence makes any difference to anybody else).
Charities exist to fight for meaningful causes. When faced with the necessity to make a decision as to which charity to run for in the upcoming 2011 Nondon Marathon (IN 70 DAYS!!), we selected Wateraid and Shelter , as we reasoned that water and housing are but the most fundamental needs of any being. When Shelter, the housing and homelessness charity got back to us, we were absolutely delighted.
As restless and insatiable beings, we have always been peripatetic, as we traverse the worlds and lifetimes, necessarily in solitude, but doing our best in each life and dimension as well as we can. This is by no means a unique position – with today’s highly mobile population, and with the ubiquity of smart mobile gadgets, we have become location-independent as ‘digital nomads’, in this Life 3.0. Which wonderfully coincides with our own attempts to continually strip ourselves of baggage (in a previous life, giving up the paintbrush and canvas in 1995, for the film camera, then the video camera, and today, with only our laptop as not only our studio, but our life itself, as we store our data on the invisible ‘cloud’ online. A compulsive reduction of clutter, and the active application of the [Buddhist] dictum of non-attachment that nonetheless lies in direct contradiction with the instinct to hoard, to hold on to things… Short of stripping ourselves of ourselves, what next?????????????????????). Yet we are well aware that this discussion is rich. There are many, many who are not itinerant by choice, for a vast complex web of reasons. How can those who have the ability to make such a choice, respond to those who do not?
As runners, we do the only thing we can do, that is, to run. As we have said repeatedly, our running is but a small (and futile?) gesture in the scheme of things, but a small step towards an attempt to not be a part of a/the problem. If that is at all possible.
With the political and economic climate still looking difficult, please help us support the work of Shelter. The images show us the affordability – or rather, un-affordability- of living in London for those claiming housing benefit for the next 5 years, when the cuts by the ConDem Government takes place. This research has been compiled by Alex Fenton, research associate of the Centre for Housing and Planning Research of the University of Cambridge (5 November 2010). As Nondoners, we are concerned. Nondoners forced out of Nondon because of prohibitive prices – where can these Nondoners go? Will this become a Nondon that is populated only by a certain group of the society?? Where can these Nondoners run to? What would that Nondon be like??? What sort of Nondon do we want???
Let us all run for Shelter, now.
For high resolution maps and full analysis, please visit the Shelter website!
IN 2011 JANUARY 11, WE (Kaidie, Kai die, Kai live, Kai Syng Tan, dead Kai) POPPED UP AT ASIA TATLER (Singapore).
As you well know, we are highflying, highlycultured, highlycultivated, highbrowed and hightea-ed. At the same time, we are thick as a slice of 14-month-old Tesco’s nofrills white-sliced bread (made of highly-refined plain flour!!), and our humour, as you our dear Reader knows well by now, is lowbrow and scatological. Yeah baby. Nonetheless, at the very least we do have a sense of humour. We are uncertain if many other people can say the same. Our life as it is has been fluctuating high-and-low as usual, but a few weeks ago it was temporarily associated with the high society, as we (all of us – Kai, Kaidie, Kai Syng, Kai Die, Kai Live, Kai Lives) were featured in the Tatler Asia (Singapore) magazine. Not our usual strasse shall we say, as our usual strasse is concrete (specifically on the pavements of lovely large cities) as well as ones-and-zeroes (on the information superhighway). Here is the lowdown (how could we possibly resist such a cheap pun??).
MEETING AND NON-MEETINGS IN NONDON: KAIDIE AND CLIVE ANDERSON
To conform to the jolliness of the new year spirit, we had compiled a list of things that quicken the heart. Now that we are past all that intoxicated partying and feelgoodness, we now share a list of some of our pet peeves as Nondoners / Nondon runners, which include:
1. Young and / or bad and self-righteous parents with strollers in tow, and obese-people blocking our paths when we are running; 2. Anything flapping from our body when we run (hair, clothes, flesh etc); 3. Having to run as Michelin Men in Winter; 4. Why we have to pay so much for good crisp bubbly in this isle; 5. Why we have to pay so much for seafood in this isle (and it is an isle!); 6. Pollution from the traffic 7. The taste of Nondon tap water; 8. Dogs and more so, dog-owners who, like parents, have the stench of smugness (‘I am sure the whole world ALSO adore my cute dogs/kids! Look at their envy!’) when we want to shout to them: ‘Leash up your bloody poodles and please wipe up their poo and your silly smile when you let them run after runners’; 9. Short men aggressively pumping iron in the gym; 10. Middle-aged men.
This post is about the final point. Specifically, we are drawing your attention to 3 exceptions from the media world to this final point: they are our beloved, in no particular order: 1) Jon Snow 2) Jeremy Paxman 3) Clive Anderson. (Actually, 3.5, if we include 3.5: Ken Livingston since he appears often enough in our favoured Have I Got News For You, we can consider him as a media figure and hence save our arses and stay clear of politics).
Hence, when the opportunity came up for a chance to catch THE UBER-BRILLIANT Clive Anderson in the flesh, we jumped at it. On 20 December 2010, Monday 11am, in conditions described over and over again as ‘arctic’ by the media, we visited the BBC Radio Theatre in Central Nondon, to be ‘live’ audiences of the Radio 4 programme Loose Ends. (This is not the first time we attended BBC events – previously we had risked ill health and visited BBC to catch a glimpse of another middle-aged man we fancy, Grayson Perry, with CFTE [Companion For The Evening]).
As expected Clive Anderson was bantering, at top speed, first thing he stepped onto the stage. As expected in a way as well, Clive was not 6feet4 (and we say this being seated in the second row, but at least he was not pumping iron). As this recording was to be broadcast on New Years day, Anderson urged us to sound merry. So we did, clapping and cheering wildly. We were treated to music by a ukulele band, and appearances by guests from television and theatre. It was good fun, compactly packed in a single hour. Watching the superbly intelligent and witty ex-lawyer ‘live’, unedited yet ever-so-brilliantly sharp, reminded us why we admire him.
At the end of the show, we wanted to approach Anderson – while he was still lingering on stage, and we a couple of yards (whatever a yard is) away, yet not close (or civilised for us) enough for us to shout. Unfortunately, one of the ushers -in black of course- prevented us from doing that, in a firm tone. We repeated our requests, and the usher did too, in a firm voice ‘of authority’. This unleashed an unpleasant memory from a previous life, when we had an experience of our lifetimes when we underwent layer after layer of interrogation (and patting down, and ransacking of our bags inside out, et al) when we were boarding and leaving the El Al to attend a lovely film festival. We glared at the lady, silently. We left the studio and stomped our icy feet on the icy ground.
Meeting, yet not quite meeting -is that not what Nondon excels in?
We go to bed and dream our recurrent dream of riding the Trans-Siberian, in loops. We wake up, in cold sweat, to (another) new year. Livid, we run a deliriouscatharticmadloop in a myopicdarkness at our favourite Regents Fark at 6am. We only begin to calm down with the words of Bruce Chatwin:
One afternoon in the early 70s, in Paris, I went to see the architect and designer Eileen Gray, who at the age of ninety-three thought nothing of a fourteen-hour working day. She lived in the rue Bonarparte, and in her salon hung a map of Patagonia, which she had painted in gouache.
‘Ive always wanted to go there,’ I said. ‘So have I,’ she added. ‘Go there for me.’ I went. I cabled Sunday Times: ‘Have Gone to Patagonia’. In my rucksack I took Mandelstam’s Journey to Armenia and Hemingway’s In Our Time. Six months later I came back with the bones of a book that, this time, did get published. While stringing its sentences together, I thought that telling stories was the only conceivable occupation for a superfluous person such as myself. I am older and a bit stiffer, and I am thinking of settling down. Eileen Gray’s map now hangs in my apartment. But the future is tentative.
Bruce Chatwin, ‘I Always Wanted to go to Patagonia’, 1983, in Anatomy of Restlessness, Viking, 1996, p. 13.
DO COME TO OUR 2 (OUT OF 4) OF OUR GIGS IN NONDON THIS WEEK!
This week, we are conducting 4 presentations – 2 of which you are cordially invited to! As for the other 2, we will tell you about them later – depending on how they go, that is. At press time, however, these other 2 gigs are state secrets…
** LATEST: We are running the 2011 Nondon Marathon on the 17th of April for Shelter, and will need YOUR help to raise £1600! ! TO MAKE A DONATION CONTACT US at <dislocation@3rdlifekaidie.com> THIS AND ONLY THIS CAN SECURE OUR FRIENDSHIP (or ‘friendship’) – we will run FOR YOU – what more can you ask of us?? **
Image from Timeout / First Thursdays site
2) Performance: Saturday 3 December 11:30hrs-12:30hrs. Part of the Sexuate Subjects Conference 2-4 December.
We are putting up a short ‘live’ performance at Sexuate Subjects: Politics, Poetics and Ethics, held at the University College Nondon. This conference brings together high-profile speakers from all over the world, to response to feminist Luce Irigaray‘s ideas. There is an entry fee to participate in this conference – to register please look here.
There you go. Hope to see you– soon(er) or later.
By hook or by crook.
One way or another.
This way or that.
Every now and then.
Here or there.
Online or off.
This year or the next.
This life, or the next.
Till then.
WE ARE PRESENTING OUR COLLABORATIVE WORK WITH DR. JAMIE O’BRIEN on 16 NOVEMBER.
Image taken from DH website
On Tuesday 16 November, we are making a 10-minute presentation with Dr Jamie O’Brien (aka Majei!) on our ongoing research, at the Slade School of Dine Art, University College Nondon. (We are also making a short, 7-minute power-fruit-punched presentation of our work before that!). Led by Dr O’Brien, an artist who is also a Research Fellow of the Digital Humanities of University College Nondon, the research aims to create a conceptual prototype of a (new kind of) collaborative space, with the final aim of the creation of an ‘augmented reality guidebook’ that would be useful for both members of Headway East London, as well as all other Nondoners at large! Jamie works closely with the leader of the Discovery Programme at Headway East, psychologist Ben Graham, who has been responsible for new and innovative work under the Discovery Progamme with the members of Headway East London. Ben was also the one who took the picture below, which shows ourselves (in blue, pretending to look very, very hard at work, knowing that the camera was looking), Dr O’Brien (in check shirt), Firoza (in white), Joshua (in stripes) and Byron (who is very shy and hence, hiding behind Jamie, in blue), in the midst of generating a series of maps, caught in a video shoot in July 2010 for Social Care TV.
Picture and words by Ben Graham from the Discovery Blog.
Please click here to have a look at the video commissioned by Social Care TV, from which you can learn more about the excellent work of Headway East, as well as other organisations working with people with learning difficulties. You can see details of this mapping session, as well as other mapping exercises by members of Headway East here. To attend the 16 November presentation, please register here. See you soon/see you later/see you sooner or later!
Image from Social Care TV website.
You can see a documentation of the evening’s presentation on artist Laura Cinti’s site! Laura herself also made a presentation that evening on her research with live organisms (Thank you Laura!)
Composite image by artist Laura Cinti, published in her websitsite. As you can see, we are quite vertically-challenged behind the lecturn that we cannot fully prove our presence that evening.
WHERE ARE WE, AND WHERE ARE WE GOING?? Running about in Nondon today, we ran into a sea of people who are LIVID about the Coalition cuts to education.
The demonstration is happening as we speak (However, we are hearing of violent clashes, which certainly does not sound good for anybody). Students, lecturers and education workers from all over the UK are stopping traffic in Central Nondon, in response to the Coalition Government’s announcement of drastic cuts all across education, including up to a 100% cut in funding for the Arts and Humanities, as we heard. We took pictures of the furious crowd as we ran into them in the middle of our running about in Nondon. We even ran into UK artists Susan Collins, Andrew Stahl and Jon Thomson!
We ask the same questions that we first raised in May: What now, brown cow??
FOLLOWING THE FOOTSTEPS OF WALID RAAD / THE ATLAS GROUP at the Whitechapel Gallery!
Place: Nondon. Date: 2 November 2010. Time: from 13:00hr GMT. Starting point/point of departure: Central Nondon. Loop point: Whitechapel Art Gallery. What for: To see Walid Raad's show. Route: via the City. How was it, then: Crowded. Nice Gherkin you've got. Pet peeves: 1) Shoveling past people dangling cigarettes in their fingers. 2) Women/very large people who walk slowly but occupying entire pavements 3) Women/'girls' (sic) who are in a large group but walking very slowly or giggling and chatting away in the middle of the pavement believing that they look cute and are drawing attention - indeed, from an angry runner 4) Children/babies/prams with young parents with same level of entitlement as the chatty women and fat bastards who block entire pavements and roads, as if they are the first people on earth who have given birth and hence demand special treatment and that the rest of the world have been created from playdoh. We don't blame the kids but we blame their smugly parents. GET OUT OF OUR £k*fING FACE!!!! Attire: Short-sleeved T-shirt and shorts. Temperature: 14 degrees celsius (sweaty run). Smell: Not So Terribly Good for an art gallery (or elsewhere). Quality of outward-bound run: Painful now with not one, but BOTH legs with shin splints. Could not get a comfortable gait. At least our limp is balanced now. Run back was easier and even sweatier.
On 2 November, we awoke from a 12-hour sleep (after none the previous night) to run through the City to the Whitechapel Gallery. There are many, many artists we admire (Chris Marker, Marc Chagall, AES+F, Tarkovsky, Fernando Pessoa et al). Walid Raad/Atlas Group is one of these people whose footsteps we (attempt to) follow. In a previous life we had the privilege of experiencing his performance-lecture in a workshop we attended. Already conflating fact with fiction, objectivity with subjectivity, history with memory, ‘official’ grand narratives with micronarrative in our own work, and already familiar with the genres of the essay film, performance as practitioner, lecturer and sometime writer, Raad’s performance-lecture made an impact.
At this Whitechapel show, Raad’s appropriation of museum aesthetics in a trademark clinical austerity in his approach is chillingly disturbing as it is dead funny. We particularly love the small model of a gallery which contains tiny precise replica of his work.
We realised that there was another source of chilliness, and that came from our exposed legs. Another observation: except for primary school kids, not many other gallery-goers wear shorts. Was that why we received some interesting looks from the gallery-sitters, as we did when we visited the Wolfgang Tillmans show after a 30km run in Hyde Park? Will spandex and leg warmers have saved us from the faux pas (if it was indeed one), and also help us look ‘tuned in’ onto the retro ’80s look (or at the very least, an artistically clever and ironic wink/nod, that the artistically clever and ironic art world would approve of)? As usual, suggestions and advice welcome.
The above is the GPS track of our run to the gallery and back, totaling about 8.9km. For a detailed version of this and other GPS tracks of ours in Life 1.0, look here.
Anyhow. Go run with Walid Raad. He’s not bad at all.
ARE YOU A LONDONER? ENTER QUIZ NOW! LONDON QUIZ 2
Of course, I would love to meet all of you out there, and most of all, YOU, yes YOU! But please understand that I can’t quite do that, much as I would love to (yes, believe me, for real). So the best space and time where we can come together is here. FILL THIS UP AND SUBMIT TO KAIDIE, NOW! There are more than 5 different quizzes. Do complete them all! And you can fill up as many as you wish. I will publish the most interesting ones! THOSE WITH THE BEST ANSWERS WILL WIN A SPECIAL, SECRET PRIZE FROM KAIDIE!
CHAT WITH KAIDIE ‘LIVE’ SATURDAY 16:00hrs + SUNDAY 18:30hrs (Singapore time)! We’re at ‘kaidie3rdlife’ on Skype.
Above: From the ARTSingapore catalogue. Below: from I-S magazine, Singapore.
MOVING ON: GOODBYE KINGS KROSS, GOODBYE SUMMER
Now that it is October, now that we have to start replacing our running singlets and shorts with running tights and over our dri-fit singlet a long sleeved T-shirt that is removable mid-run when we are sufficiently warmed up, now that the humidity is fading, now that the sweating has ceased, now that hot soups provide more comfort than raw food, now that we are layering ourselves with jumpers and scarfs, now that we wear socks again, now that the sandals are put away because the toes are cold in those, now that we do not want to commit the fashion faux pas of teaming socks with sandals (even in matching or interesting colour combinations), now that when we go out we put our fingers in our pockets, now that we have moved, now that we have moved on, now that Kings Kross, and photographs of Kings Kross captured on our memory machines are but things of a/the past, now that these people captured one August afternoon on a Sunday have left, now that Sundays have no sun, now that there is no difference between Sundays, Saturdays, Fridays, ThursWedsTuesMondays, now that there is no difference between day/night, now that the windows are shut, now that the duvets are out, now that when we wash our hands we turn on the tap with the red mark too and then because water from it is always too hot as if 60 degrees celsius or so we have to do a to-&-fro-ing between this and the other tap with a blue mark, now that we want to run more so that we stop feeling cold, now that we are entering our 10th month of existence, even though being afloat at the the outdoor heated pool feels like being in an oasis even more than before perhaps in defiance of the changing weather, even though the clocks are still on British Summer Time, even though our Summer and Summery restlessness is still around perhaps more again in defiance or because it really is season-and-weather-resistant, even though Regents Fark remains our Favourite Fark, even though we may say this till the cows come home, even though our relationship with cows are limited to the supermarket and sometimes with human animals whom we may not favour and hence call them by that name, even though we are reluctant, we hereby officially declare (our) official Summer as officially over, and welcome Fall.
Unofficially, however, we are open for negotiations.
If you think you’ve got a good deal.
Talk ‘live’ with Kaidie on Skype on 7th, 9th and 10th October at ART Singapore 2010!
As you are aware, we are going to be virtualy a-live at ART Singapore 2010. Directed by Meena Mylvaganam, who is also one of our co-runners in our grandiouse quest, this is an annual event of contemporary art from Asia. We will be presenting a 50-minute film and prints for sale. In addition, we will also talk with YOU, our dear Conspirators of Pleasure, at the following times (Singapore time, followed by British Summer Time): Thursday 7 oct 20:00 Singapore at the Gala opening dinner of the show (13:00hrs BST); 9 October Saturday 16:00 Singapore (09:00hrs BST); 10 October Sunday 18:30hrs Singapore (11:30hrs BST). Come grab us and have a chat with us! The following is an article published in the Business Times Singapore, following an interview with us – via Skype of course – on 16 September.
This article has been cropped – and you CAN NO LONGER read the original here!! Unless you pay a subscription fee… How terribly interesting! Not. And, as usual, there are inaccuracies in the article at different levels, factual (for instance we are only 10 months old, not already 3 years old as reported) and otherwise (We are not Kaidie ‘because’ of the necessity of following our own footsteps of having generated a traveler persona; we run, and we are Kaidie, and we travel, and we have been travelling for twenty years, because we are against stagnancy, complacency, passivity and the status quo, including our own. We say this as we remove cobwebs from our hair, eyebrows, armpits, nostrils, legs and toes, having been sitting at the library combing our way slowly and painfully, over a Chapter that we are writing…). But as usual, let us not nitpick. See you soon. Not. Maybe.
