Adventures in Newcastle. Part One.

Tonight’s post has two bits. But they both relate back to my recent becoming-a-Novocastrian. Enjoy.

The trip down

We were supposed to leave at ten that morning, but running on true Hazelgrove time meant that we didn’t get away until after lunch. Dad was still busy working on the Suzuki, and I was doing some last minute boxing. At about 11am Dad pulls me outside for the most intense ten minute car-mechanic-intro I think most people could experience. It is one of those little things that I wish I could do – like speaking Japanese or being able to build small explosives – be a bit of a closet mechanic. There’s something cool about grease-marked hands and the feeling of working with your hands.

My session went something along the lines of

“Radiator. Pressurised. You have a butterfly’s chance in hell of getting it open when the engine is hot, so don’t try. Coolant goes in there - it’s green.

Oil. Dipstick. Don’t get oil on the engine when you pull the dipstick out it’s bad this is the full line don’t let it get below halfway down the indicator tare the stick before you measure.

This is the lock for the bonnet; make sure you can open it without looking at it.

Coolant overflow. Window-water. Check everything once a week. Engine gets over halfway on the temp gauge that is bad. Come around the back spare tyre….”

From there I was suddenly engaged in the act of removing the rear left tyre using the other definite piece of anti-darking-metal in the car. I quite like my tyre iron. It has an ‘I’m serious’ feel to it. It doesn’t have a name yet. 

Anyhow, changing the tyre probably would have been more fun if I hadn’t had the sun heating up my unprotected shoulders and back. I could feel the heat, and almost expected to hear the sizzling of pork-like-meat as I knelt by the jack and tyre.

The last lesson I had with the car before bailing back inside to continue streamlining the crapola I was bringing with me was how the steering lock worked. Dad explained the purpose of the oddly-shaped piece of steel and how to operate it and why I should definitely not put with the end on the right side of the car because that would damage the window.

Once again, the anti-darking-metal-topic crossed my mind, and I’ve got no idea as to whether the idea manifested itself there and then or formed over the space of this week. Either way, my blue steering lock is now called Appropriation.

I'll give you a photo of it tomorrow. If I remember.

(By the way, if all this is refusing to make sense I would suggest looking for a trilogy of books by Scott Westerfield. It’s called The Midnighters and the main enemies hate steel, groups of thirteen and new things.)

So. Fast-forward to leaving time; Prue has located a mixed CD that I think I burnt in 2004 or 2005. Either way, it’s old and there is an embarrassing amount of bad music on it. 

Jack had located the gorilla costume he’d purchased online which had arrived on Friday and he put it on, in spite of the oppressive heat outside. Laughter ensued. 

There’s just something that I think is about full-body-animal suits. It’s like they have some sort of power because other people cannot see your face = anonymous = act stupid. Well, more outlandish than normal, at the very least. Ten minutes of side-splitting, tear-generating laughter and I ducked inside for the last, almost-most-important-thing-to-do-before-travelling.

Sunscreen.

To put it this way, the dear Swift had the window tint peel off about six years ago. It is a two-door car, and it predates air conditioner, so the only form of ventilation is the window. Open window. Sun. Lots of it.

Equals sunscreen. Lots of that too.

Prue and I headed up the party, with Dad in behind driving the Tarago. We weren’t even halfway to the stop when I began to feel the sensation of burning flesh, so by the time we pulled over at Coolongolook, my left arm was roughly the same colour as….as…..well, go and look for some pencils. Coloured ones will be of more use. Look for the one called ‘Vermillion’. Got it? I was that colour.

We pulled out a towel and I draped it over my shoulders in the hopes of delaying skin-cancer by approximately two hours.

It was on the next leg that more things happened. Dad started to film us driving, and Prue pulled out her camera to take the odd photo of the two of us. I drove.

Me trying not to laugh.

I think she was secretly very pleased about wearing my top-hat the whole way.

Or not so secretly.

Dad continued behind us into Newcastle, which was one of the single most scary things I have ever done. City driving + cars + cars + cars + directions + big intersections + red lights + cars = lots of stress.

There was also the 'green apples' tree that Dad had hung in the car. It was incredibly pungent. The car continues to reek of 'green apples' in an eerily similar fashion to as it had about ten years ago when Dad first bought the car and had 'green apple' in a spritzing bottle. It's still in the laundrey somewhere, harbouring memories of what 'green apple' should smell like. I think.

The end of this part of the story I guess was that we did get to Russell’s in one piece. Prue and Dad and I started unpacking stuff until Dad went to go buy food. The bottom line?  We were all knackered, and probably the simplest pleasure we derived from that evening was sticking our legs in the pool at 10pm. 

That’s right. I’ve now got immediate access to a pool. Be jealous.

Dad and Prue left at about 11:30pm and I headed inside. It was so hot; that was one of my primary impressions. Russell, the landlord, found a louver fan and I slept with it pointed at my head.

Bec arrived the next day with her family, whereupon a similar process was repeated, albeit with slightly less drama, and they arrived at three. PM.

Banksy.

It was either last year or the year before that my sister came home from art at school and promptly introduced me to the artist ‘Banksy’. After we checked out some history on the guy we learned more about his stencil-based works and origins. Banksy is from Bristol, and there are a lot of his works in and around the city of London. There was a few in Sydney and Melbourne a couple of years back, but they were buffed, so you can’t find them anymore.

I’m in London. So, in short, I went looking for Banksy pieces this week.

I should probably take a moment here to express my opinion in general about graffiti.

It started more as a coping mechanism than anything else. I mentally divide what I see into two groups.

The first group I classify as graffiti. This includes general vandalism, ‘tagging’ and slogans designed specifically to offend some group or tell the rest of the world about someone’s conquests or the contents of their pants. I don’t really like these. They are frequently messy, and do little to make the environment a better or more interesting place.

The second group is ‘Street art’. These guys take more than thirty seconds to create and usually less than three beers. They house signs of intelligence behind the piece and show pride in the work. It’s usually evident that more than three brain cells went into producing whatever it was. Also, street art is often relevant in some way to a current issue.

Banksy pieces fall into the ‘street art’ classification for me.

Seeing Banksy stuff was cool. Like, they were actually there. Where the directions said they were. They existed and you could see them. It’s significantly cooler than looking for a Van Gogh or Monet in the National Gallery because even though you still search for it, there are an infinitely larger amount of things that can happen to a piece of street art/graffiti over the same period of time. And the local council doesn’t try to paint over a piece of post-impressionist work because of its location.

I’ll admit; this can be considered a hard point for councils to argue. Leaving a Banksy means you would have to leave all the graffiti. I don’t want to leave the stuff about someone’s pet goat because that is offensive but then, I’d have to define what is ok and what isn’t, and in the end, we have double standards. Double standards, along with Facebook, large parties and trash-mag-journos don’t seem to work very well for governing bodies. So in reality, it means that it is up to the owner of whatever-got-attacked to decide what to do with it. Sometimes they try selling it on eBay. I have heard of a lot of people going so far as to remove walls or doors to sell pieces, frequently for thousands (of whatever currency you please. If we’re talking yen then it’ll be in the millions.). That isn’t very fair, in my opinion, because the contributing artist gains no monetary benefit from the work.

But then, this guy could go into business if he wanted. It’s highly possible that he gains some benefit from the escapades, since he can so obviously maintain an agent, however anonymous he might be to Joe Public. But that would involve becoming part of the system – dancing because the man wants you to, not because you wish to step outside of the box.

I like metaphors.

Anyway. Where were we?

Over the course of the week, I researched what pieces were still in existence, scribbling notes down from a combination of internet and a book I’d picked up from the Tate Modern. Its nickname is ‘BLT’ (Banksy Locations and Tours, volume 1, from Martin Bull). So, I’d flick through the book, looking for the status of the piece. The tours are pretty much obsolete, since so many pieces have been either removed or flogged off on eBay. But I scribbled down the ones that were.

Directions kinda looked like this:

So I’d set off in the morning with my notebook, a compass the size of my thumbnail, and my tube map that was literally marked with several ‘X’ points – tube stations I’d disembark from. Maps weren’t easy for me since they’d either be too vague or too direct. Instead, I’d walk in a cardinal direction until a bus stop turned up – they would have a local map and that would be the method for finding the piece.

This method was fun. An adventure, if you like. I would frequently get lost, walk to a bus stop, check the map and head out again. There was a lot of walking involved, but walking was kinda what I had not done so much of since getting a driver’s license last year. I would seriously stake that fitness in young kids goes down once they are able to drive – no more walking places (!). Anyway. Lots of walking. I enjoyed it because the shoes were able to take it. And there was sun, in spite of the cold (you know, enjoying a high of 7 degrees – that sort of thing.). Tips? Don’t panic. Use landmarks rather than ‘take the first right, then the third left; diverge to the south and take the second exit on the roundabout’ (Give me directions like this and I’ll nod dumbly, knowing that the info is going straight in and straight out.) I will gladly take ‘keep going past the chicken shop’ over that any day. Even pointing and vaguely saying ‘it’s that way’ will work better.

Initially, progress was slow. My first day saw a grand total of two pieces visited. Admittedly, I didn’t head out until late morning, but once the method was better defined, searching became a lot more fun.

What became interesting as the days of searching went on was that my mind became more aware of wall-scribblings that I passed. On more than one occasion, I passed a piece not on my list and wondered idly if it might have been a new piece that wasn’t yet listed.

This little guy was on the other side of the road from the ‘Tesco’ piece. At the bottom of the art deco cinema. And it was unmistakeably an art deco cinema. I had my doubts as to where the building was when I first entered the street, because it wasn’t immediately next to the station I had listed in the bearings. And then I started looking around and on sighting the…thing…it became clear, without a shadow of a doubt, that that was the art deco cinema. It wasn’t so much a ‘light bulb’ moment as a confirmation of perfect clarity. Because there was absolutely nothing else on the entire street that was as tiled or as gaudy.

Of course, not all of these finds were in tiptop condition. Workplace hazard, I guess.

Of course, there was also the Gas Mask girl.

Kathy (my aunt) and I encountered her in Brick Lane, post-leather-jacket adventure that was Saturday arvo. We were walking towards a bus-stop, and suddenly as we walked over to the corner I realised what the slew of black and white was.

Me: “Hey! It’s the Gas Mask Girl!”

Kathy: “What?”

Me: “The Gas Mask Girl. It’s a Banksy. It’s like, the only one left in Europe or something. Just gimme a sec here. (Takes photo)

Kathy: “Well I’m glad you knew what it was ‘cause I had no idea.”

I hadn’t put Gas Mask Girl in my shortlist, simply because the information that went with it from the BLT read like this:

“Status: Extremely faded and often attacked by the remanets of fly posters (July 2010), but it’s the only example I know of in the UK, so it might just be worth a visit if you are desperate.”

I wasn’t desperate. I didn’t even know that it was in Brick Lane. But it was rather cool to stumble across it, even if it was almost unrecognisable.

BTW This is my photograph; the one up the page
is from a googlesearch.
So you could see what she looked like.

A couple days ago, I started putting pen to paper over the idea of graffiti. I’ve not been in the middle of it, but there were taggers in my year. I knew them and ‘who’ they were and what they did, since I’d often see it around town, or, back when we were in school, I’d hear them talking about what they’d done the night before. Back then, I asked them how they developed a tag. They had explained that there were two things you did.

The first was that you found a word to become your ‘tag’. It had to represent some part of you – it was, after all, yours. It also had to be short and simple – a logistics point, so that you could throw it up quickly. The second part was choosing how it looked – usually involving finding a font on the internet you liked or simply developing the tag over time. That was it.

Well, almost it. My headspace was placed somewhere in between these massive pieces of street art and the simple science of scribbling part of your essence on someone’s wall. So, I started thinking about the logistics. This is what happened after that.

“It seems to me that graffiti is, essentially, a point of identity. No human wants to go from the cradle to the grave unnamed. Each of us, as individuals, seems to house an innate desire to be recognised as a person. As someone who mattered.

Graffiti is one of those outworkings – I was here. I was here. I existed. I mattered. I want to matter.

In this way I see God’s character reflected, as oddly as it may seem – that this scribbling has manifested as a desire to see individual character and existence recognised.

One of the reasons I have come to appreciate some street artists is because they are akin to…how do I say this?...like, if this was the Matrix, they’d be the ‘glitches’. The little things to give us evidence that the Agents are up to something. Some sort of black-humour reality check. All is not well; that somewhere in the system over our heads, something is going on.”

Binary Dates and Princess Lime

This is something I realised a couple days ago. And by a couple of days ago, I mean a couple of months ago. I left it to stew, and had left it as an unpublished post. Now that I have completely formed the idea, Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you the theory of Binary Dates.

Every century, there are thirty-six binary dates that occur.

Since binary is composed purely of zeroes and ones, this means that all these dates are squeezed into the first eleven years of said century, of which only four years contain them.

Each year that will have a binary date ends in '00, '01, '10, or '11. There are nine dates in total - three in January, three in October and three in November.

Understanding Binary

Binary comes in a sequence of eight digits, each of which can be a zero or a one.

00000000

Each of these placements indicates a different number, starting from one and doubling eight times. A one in the sequence of eight indicates one of those numbers, which can be added to other ones in the group. The highest number in this string of eight possible is two hundred and fifty-five.

Simply, read it like this.

128  64  32  16  8  4  2  1            (Base 10)

  0     0    0    1   1   1  1  0            (Base 2)

0+0+0+16+8+4+2+0 = 40

And that's how you learn binary in five minutes.

I had been working on this since last year, when I realised that the date set out would be binary in nature.

And since I was awake with a flat iPod on the way out of Paris on the Eurostar just over a week ago, I decided to write up the dates and do the maths.

I didn't have anything normal, 80gsm paper to write on at the time. So it's scribbled on a tissue.

I'll type it all out anyway because that doesn't look like the most legible stack of numbers ever written.

Binary Solo!

2000                    2001                  2010                   2011

00010100            00010101          00010110           00010111

00100100            00100101          00100110           00100111

00110100            00110101          00110110           00110111

00011000            00011001          00011010           00011011

00101000            00101001          00101010           00101011

00111000            00111001          00111010           00111011

00011100            00011101          00011110           00011111

00101100            00101101          00101110           00101111

00111100            00111101          00111110           00111111

Okay. I'm beginning to feel a little weird. Typing lots of zeros and ones does strange things to the inside of your head. Anyway, I'm pretty sure this happened when I wrote it out the first time too. What was freakier was when I started translating those dates into numbers.

(oh, and BTW Blogger doesn't do columns. So if my formatting starts getting weird you'll at least know what's going on.)

2000                    2001                    2010                    2011

  36                        37                        38                        39
  68                        69                        70                        71
100                      101                      102                      103
  40                        41                        42                        43
  72                        73                        74                        75
104                      105                      106                      107
  44                        45                        46                        47
  76                        77                        78                        79
108                      109                      110                      111

For all my non-numerical friends or those who are starting to think I should start on the medication, hang in there.

The numbers for a year don't line up. But the same date over the course of the years escalates the number. I was honestly weirded out by now.

Post Eurostar, I had not done any more of this work. After all, it's all translated from Binary. Tempted to thread it into an ASCII chart though.
(What the heck, I'll do it anyway.)

Understanding ASCII
ASCII is a little easier for people to understand I think. Most people have encountered ASCII art at some stage. After all, the little emoticons we create every day - :) :( XD :P - are all ASCII art.

If you are having difficulty seeing the image, move your head back further from the screen. Make sure you come back to see where this goes, because I don't know what the ASCII-filter will do.

Anyway. ASCII is the code that computers use to generate letters and characters. They can only comprehend binary, so what happens is that a number is attached to each character typed and the computer can respond to that number.

For example, the number 65 is a capital A.

You know what? I can't explain it that well. I'll just assume that if you're still reading, then you understand what I'm babbling on about. If not, then accept that ASCII is a code. Like Binary. This number = this character.

Let's do this.

2000                    2001                    2010                    2011

$                          %                        &                         '

D                         E                         F                          G

d                          e                         f                            g

(                           )                         *                           +

H                         I                          J                           K

h                          i                           j                            k

,                           -                          .                            /

L                         M                         N                         O 

l                           m                         n                           o

Formatting doesn't work. Woop.

Well, that was anticlimatic.

I mean, what meaning can you pull from that?

I've got HIME (Japanese for princess)

and LIME.

There's our century, folks.

PRINCESS LIME.