The International Center of Cultural Exchange and Diplomatic Friendship: Day 1.

I'm in Liverpool until Saturday. I'm not sure why. Ostensibly I'm here to take part in a residency program run by Penny Whitehead and Daniel Simpkins, but in reality, I just looked at google calendar on Sunday night and it said LIVERPOOL from Wednesday until Saturday so now I'm here.

That is how my life works, I just set my phone to tell me what I'm doing , and then I do it. I don't know what I'd do if my phone broke. I'd probably just write everything on scraps of paper and be early/late/in the wrong place all the time like I used to.

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I was walking across London Bridge the other day and I thought 'I've thrown my life at the wall and it didn't stick'. It came through like that, in speech marks, as though I was saying it, but I wasn't. It was being said, but not by me. I think it means that I consider myself a failure, or, at that moment I was considering the idea of considering myself a failure.

On the train up here I thought 'I feel like I've been pumped by the world', again, in speech marks - someone else's words somehow. I guess by pumped I mean fucked or milked. Like I am a bag of pus that has been squeezed by a giant hand and now I'm empty.

A friend reminded me that I had a saying that was the axiomatic basis of my thinking when I was at art college. He quoted it to me - wrote it down actually, and put quotation marks around it, "Everything is fucked and nothing will ever be ok". I smiled and laughed - it was meant to be a joke at the time, but sort of a true joke.

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I went to watch a film about Stuart Hall at the Bluecoat. It was a three screen digital projection. As I walked in I heard a very loud Windows "error" noise




And then as the film looped the Quicktime toolbar came up on the screen.



There was a fly in the room. It appeared occasionally in front of the screens, casting a tiny shadow and giving the film a 3D vibe that was distracting but not unpleasant.

A geezer in a shell suit came into the room. He sat next to me. He smelled really bad. Nylon isn't a very breathable fabric.


Two women walked in and came over to sit near me and the shell suit guy. I thought, 'I hope they don't think that smell is coming from me'. This was a real thought and I just thought it without having to think about thinking it, even though I didn't know the women, and I wasn't going to speak to them, so it didn't matter if they thought it was me who smelled bad.

It was obviously the man in the shell suit who smelled bad though. The shiny-ness of the shell suit was visible even in the dark room.

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I walked past a nightclub called the Krazyhouse. I felt like I'd had a dream about it, a dream where I was in the foyer and I was waiting for someone to arrive and when they arrived then we'd have to try and kill each other but they never came and that's how the dream ended; in the brightly coloured, but still dank and sad foyer of a nightclub that I have never been to, waiting in the cold transition from street to club, that smelled of both stale and fresh alcohol, cigarette smoke from outside, and the Red Bull tainted sweat of the bouncers, who eyed me warily, tolerating my presence but only just.