Badaude

Tate Giveaway!

DEADLINE EXTENDED 'TIL THE END OF MONDAY 10TH OCTOBER: WINNER ANNOUNCED ON TUESDAY 11TH!

I'm excited to say that the Tate has just started selling a very limited edition of prints from my book, London Walks!. These 'sketchbook' pieces, printed on the attractive buff-coloured pages of the sketchbooks I usually use, are limited to five of each design and the Tate currently stock pictures I've drawn of Hammersmith, Columbia Road, London Bus routes, The Tate-to-Tate Boat route, Piccadilly Circus, South Kensington/V&A, Brick Lane and London Fields lido. Most prints are available either framed or unframed.

The prints sell at £85 unframed or £130 framed but I also thought I'd give one away (unframed 'cause I don't fancy the chances of glass in the post) to one of you... 

Here's a picture of it: One of my favourites - South Kensington and the Victoria and Albert Museum (click to see detail).

And this is how to enter.

Getting my head round all this social media stuff (the big stumble is actually getting over the embarrassment of asking people to 'like' or 'follow' you), I've come up with the following rules.

1) go to Facebook and/or Twitter and like Badaude and the Tate Shop.

I'm here on Facebook and here on Twitter.*

The Tate Shop is here on Facebook and here on Twitter.*

*You don't have to do all these things - you can just pick one! If you already follow both of us on all social media (!) just go to step 2.

(Got that so far?)

OK. Step 2.

2)Go to your Twitter or Facebook  account and post something that links back to here or here. I won't tell you what to write: you're clever. You can make it up yourself. If you can't think of anything else, you could always mention this giveaway.

Finally (I hope this isn't becoming too wearisome) just leave a comment below telling me you've entered so I can get in touch with you if you win. I'll pick a winner at random on Friday 7th October. Good Luck!

If that's all too much to take in, you might just prefer to know that The Tate also have 20 3 signed copies of my book in stock at the moment, in each of which I've done a tiny drawing of a diseased London pigeon.

Hackney Here!

I spent yesterday Sunday (this post has been slightly delayed due to an evening spent with Dr Richard (gin) Barnett) with some of the most interesting people in London testing the beta of the Hackney Hear app. 

Meeting in a bike-shop-stroke-cafe on the Cat & Mutton bridge I camped out for the day with an assortment of audio artists, journalists, webheads and a lateral historian, only occasionally spilling my flat white* when one of the bike engineers dropped a fixed-gear behind us.

Why was I there? I did the graphics, which were cleverly overlaid onto Googlemaps by geolocational wizards, Amblr.

 

Pocketing an i-phone, putting on the headphones and heading out into the Sunday sunshine to be guided through the borough by a disembodied, GPS-triggered Iain Sinclair, as well as a mix of writers, poets, journalists and local voices, was an odd experience for me - walking is usually a strictly undisturbed space where thoughts come together to form clusters, clouds and (eventually hopefully) ideas. I walk with a purpose - and it's usually work. 

What's more I never wear headphones, always hoping to be snagged by something I encounter. Wearing them I feel oddly insulated: the outer world a film playing with the sound down. When I take them off the disorienting re-entry into real-life 'ambient noise' makes me (literally) dizzy.

So what did I hear? A short story told from the point of view of a park bench; reminiscences of squatting in the 80s; a specially composed song about London Fields Lido; testimonials from schoolchildren, market-traders, ex-drug dealers...

And what did I see? Beautiful families with toddlers dressed in miniature trench coats breakfasting organically on the Broadway; drinking schools on the park benches in London Fields; girls dressed in spotted bustiers, heart-shaped plastic sunglasses and circus-stripe tights; dodgy geezers coming out of the betting shop opposite the wholefood deli; a 'farmers' market' in an inner-city schoolyard, and an approximately 700% incidence of the national average amount of facial hair on men under the age of 35.

Iain Sinclair asks me to sit on a bench: I refuse. I take off my headphones and hear real dogs merging with podcast canines: I put them back on again and hear a ghost game played on an empty ping-pong table: audio magic.

As I return I see another tester, the lateral historian, wandering at an aurally dictated pace - pausing and starting off again for no apparent reason. He's my mirror. Do I look like that: faintly crazy, like an escapee from one of Hackney's 18th century asylums?

We walk back together. At the bike cafe Fran Panetta, the award-winning audio producer behind the project, asked me, 'Which was the best bit?'

I think...

'The American woman outside the pub talking about whether you should visit the Grand Canyon, reminding us that when we're in one place we're always partly thinking about somewhere else too. None of us are from one place anymore, and that's part of what defines the experience of being anywhere.'

(Fran) 'Oh right... Erm I don't remember her. Which one was she?'

(Lateral historian) 'I think I heard a bit of her too' 

(Fran) 'I don't remember her at all. Are you sure it wasn't ambient noise coming through from outside?'

Outside the cafe a constant stream of people pass carrying huge bouquets from Columbia Road flower market. No longer sure which is the real Hackney, we carry on talking...

 

Want a taste before the app launches? Check out the Hackney Podcast.

*I don't actually drink flat whites or any milky coffee: it just sounded better.

Cuisine de Meuh - A few things that really look like vomit

Hey look. They have a big pan. We can get refills!.

And this pan is even bigger!

Help yourself! There's no shortage of this either...

To prove that the abovw dish is made from real, pre-digested ingredients, I photographed the recipe.

 

Come to think of it, doesn't sound much better than it looks...
 
Where oh where did these horrors come from? Why, here of course!

Cuisine de Meuh will be back again later this year (sorry)...

Cuisine de Meuh - Pretty-pretty

 We thought we could make this dish attractive by surrounding it with decorative apple rings.

It works, n'est-ce-pas?

Or does it still look like a big pile of ----

Ok do you have any suggestions that could make it look better?