The future is amazing. Just utterly amazing. I hope science doesn't progress any further in my life time or my mind will be blown. And my mind is not the first thing I want blown. If science can find a way for other parts of me to be blown then I will be really impressed. But I guess that will also blow my mind and without a mind I won't be able to meaningfully enjoy the blowing of anything else, thus making the advance non-mind blowing and so on until the Universe is destroyed.
On honeymoon my wife (still feels weird, like I am playing at being grown up- does everyone feel that? Is the whole of adult life just about pretence?) had really liked one of the pictures on the wall of our room. We had asked the lady who owned the hotel if she knew where we could get a copy of it, as it would be a nice reminder of our honeymoon and she said she'd look into it and see if the dealer she worked with had anything similar. I assumed the one in the hotel room was an original (I am not entirely sure it isn't now, though it seems unlikely) or that at least it wasn't going to be an image that was commercially available. The owner of the posh hotel had said that the picture had cost her over a thousand euro and there would be framing and delivery costs on top of that. But after making inquiries it turned out that the dealer no longer had the piece. So it looked like we were stumped. We didn't know the name of the artist so we couldn't google it to see if there was anything commercially available.
But then I remembered that the other day when googling something on my phone I'd accidentally pressed a button that I thought would show images, but which actually claimed to be able to google from a photo. My wife had taken a photo of the picture, so though I assumed I was wasting my time I took a photo of her photo (just by bringing it up on her phone screen) and googled it. And there it was. The picture came up immediately - we now knew what it was, Living the Dream I by Marta Gottfried Wiley, a piece so famous that you can buy prints of it from many places
including John Lewis. And for much cheaper than a thousand euros. Though I still can't work out what we'd have been getting from that dealer - it wasn't going to be the same image exactly. Would that have got us an original? Was that the original on the wall of our hotel room (it was a posh hotel)? Anyone know?
It was amazing to find all these things out, but more incredible still that this was done by taking a photo of a photo. I am gob smacked. But again being smacked in the gob is one of the last places I want to be smacked. When science can smack me elsewhere, then we'll be talking. Bring on the future.
And speaking of fine art - the Talking Cock poster is nearly ready, just a few small adjustments to make. Steve Brown also sent me the picture of me naked holding up the word Talking with the word Cock superimposed over my midriff. It's kind of amazing, but I am not sure the world is ready to see it. And I am glad we had the Action Man idea for the poster. Maybe we can put it in the gatefold of the DVD as an little extra, like we did with the shot of me in my pants on "Oh Fuck I'm 40". Hope you like the disturbing image we went for. Last year I lost my heart, this year my cock - what's going next?
The preview podcast (me talking in a dull and rambling way) for the forthcoming Leicester Square Theatre Podcast is now up
at the British Comedy Guide or you can subscribe
on iTunes. Go here
for tickets which are already selling fast.
