New-blog - Ina Disguise

The week of Duct tape and Banana

December 19, 2019 No Comments

This is Maurizio Cattelan, the artist behind the Duct tape and Banana. The artists of facebook are very confused about this.

It doesn’t matter how much you explain how art works to them, they are still confused.

Damien Hirst and his investment group were very open about what they did. The price was set by them with a view to later profit, and they all did very well out of it. Maurizio has done something very similar, although it is later in his career and so it packs a bigger punch.

Maurizio is also famous for a middle finger statue, a gold toilet and a statue of Hitler. He likes to cultivate a kind of monsieur Hulot version of himself.

I have been trying to rethink the performance element of Ina, since my project was rudely curtailed by Twisty and Little Shiva. I am thus far stumped, because I cannot discuss my ideas with anybody and in any case since I have now been sewing constantly for over a year, would have to spend several months recovering from sitting too much.

In the meantime, the Grumpy Dude collection is going surprisingly quickly, as work has been slow, and I am cautiously pleased, particularly with Sunset of Discontent, which I am working on at the moment.

Still too cold to proceed with Haram Bawbag, although I am considering artifical means to get it to the next stage.

I have about a weeks worth of work to do sitting in my bedroom, and I imagine this will get done over Christmas. I am very mean, so it takes me a while to persuade myself to indulge in basic things at times. These problems are usually solved if I have a visitor as I like to pretend I am civilised.

In the event you are at all interested, I am currently digging the Singh twins, Sandeep Sinde and Philmy Reyes, who is a dear friend on Facebook, you can look any of these up. I have a very wide interest area and tend to avoid other textile artists as I find some things confusing and unnecessary, and feedback has indicated that other people cannot understand why embroideries of vomit or tangled dust gathering wallhangings would be relevant or interesting.

Found myself watching some rural Indian porn on facebook today, which was tasteful and charming. My new facebook friend who was watching it was bemused by my interest, however rural Indian facebook porn usually consists of a healthy normal woman doing fairly boring household chores in a see through or dangerously precarious outfit, so it is fascinating. I see why men dig the sewing now.

Anyway, sorry it has taken a while to update, I am hard at work. I have a lot to do, because I would like Grumpy feedback before I start on the spring shoes.

Ina

Uncategorized

Sad Loser

December 7, 2019 No Comments

I cannot imagine how much of a failure I would have to be to spend my time threatening other people.

It takes a special kind of failure to spend all your time frothing at the mouth envying others, especially when your life has been so utterly selfish.

It is also indicative of stupidity.

Unlike the person causing the problem, I have had very limited time to myself. Despite this, I have a full life.

I pity you. You are an embarrassment.

business, economics

Staring at the ceiling

December 2, 2019 No Comments

Last night was not great, so I spent most of the night applying for jobs, as you do when you are a slashie.

Woke up this morning to one of the previous banks attempting to lure me into discussing their problems. Refused. I don’t have time to support people repeating second rate information in an effort to maintain a hierarchy that does not exist as long as I do not agree to it. If the banks employed more people like me and less people like some of the outstandingly dull and selfish people I have met over the last couple of years, the 2008 crash would not have happened.

I did point this out at the time. Men who are aware that they are employed purely for their ability to wear suits and smirk tend to do business with other talentless smirkers. Nobody asks any questions, because nobody wants to have any actual knowledge in case it poisons them in some way.

I often think I would have been better off in the 1950s, when companies were actually looking to improve and still had some form of ethics. Now they seem obsessed with supporting the needs of people who regard themselves and their mortgages way above any requirements of customers, so I am no use to them whatsoever.

This is not the first time a company I have clashed with has got back in touch a couple of weeks later to say, yes, actually you are right. I suppose I should be happy about that. Reality is I’m not that interested in being right. I’m interested in people getting it right, and that does not pay well.

Also what seems to have been lost in the quest for economic growth is the idea that you are only as good as your last deal. Companies often feel very complacent when they see their figures, and they do not understand that tarnishing is a gradual process. When you call them out on it, they are often very surprised and see you as a ‘lone sniper.’

One very glossy financial services company that Little Shiva and I are familiar with are a case in point. I talked to them at various levels. Whilst I rather liked the studiousness with which they attempted to ignore me, during this time at the very top end of the business no fewer than 28 senior members of staff were terminated within a few weeks of our episode. Little Shiva is welcome to look up the articles relating to it.

Anyway, this doesn’t help me much. I am tired. I’m tired of being lonely, I’m tired of nobody understanding anything, and I am really tired of stupid nasty people.

If there is a company out there that would support a manager that empowers their staff, seeks to improve business processes and actually engages people, I would like to work for you please. The research project that my working life has become is no longer on a sufficient learning trajectory to make it worthwhile. The answer seems to be that we need fewer wankers and more workers.

motivation

Nice to see you

December 1, 2019 No Comments

All of you, bizarre that you all chose to drop in to see a post about a dude walking past my car.

For clarification purposes, there is no romance going on, Grumpy Dude and I communicate a bit like angry meerkats. We have a weird emotional but not at all romantic thing that involves a lot of appreciation from a distance.

For the benefit of one of my readers, I would appreciate it if you would check in on Bawbag. I am a bit worried about him, but there is no point in my attempting any input and there is no need to involve me whatsoever. It is your issue, not mine.

Otherwise, hard at work again, although I am very much looking forward to a couple of days off this week to push things forward on Little Shiva and the new stuff. Hoping to get to the final stages of Haram Bawbag and get the windows off the ground this week.

It would be nice if I could get some of the stuff moved on whilst I complete the rest. It is looking like another month or three for the first stages of the cushions. The shoes aren’t even started yet, beyond my perfecting a superfast seamless base, which was quite a task.

If anyone can think of a subtle way of my ascertaining Grumpy Dude’s shoe size without him noticing, I would be very grateful.

Ina

creativity, motivation

A moment of sheer joy

November 29, 2019 No Comments

Only people who have experienced a lot of unpleasant episodes in their lives really understand how important moments are.

Grumpy Dude gave me a moment of sheer inexorable joy this evening, and he didn’t even have to stop and say hello. I didn’t want to ruin it.

We had a brief conversation earlier this week, but tonight was quite remarkable.

I took a night off sewing this evening, I was feeling stale, a bit sad, and it was busy at work for most of the night. Near the end of the evening, I was enjoying some supermix and looking at the world go by, and Grumpy Dude appeared out of the night, in much the same place that I was sitting last week or so.

I have found over the years that beautifully dressed men – and when I say beautifully dressed, I mean they have taken their shape and emotional self into account, and have chosen very carefully – are extremely thin on the ground. This is as much because very few women appreciate it as because they don’t consider it worth the time or lack taste. Male clothes horses quite rightly often choose to be with other men who appreciate them, so finding a fabulous dresser that is heterosexual is something that happens only rarely.

Anyway, out of the night emerges Grumpy Dude, in a quite marvellous outfit, detailing his curviness rather beautifully. He was quite clearly aware that he looked particularly magnificent, and my eyes duly popped out of my head as I drank in this vision of loveliness crossing the road.

He smiled, I smiled, he sailed past. It was perfect. After the miserable day I had, I drove home perfectly content.

Thank you grumpy dude, although I may have to rename you Foxy Dude if you keep up this level of sartorial brilliance.

business

Old School

November 25, 2019 No Comments

Learning a job on a fast track career path when very young is fast and furious, especially when you work 20 hours a day. It took less than two years to batter the bad habits out of me as a chef.

This is because, as a high pressure job, you have to learn really fast how to get the best out of people you would not even talk to in any other situation. I used to say that catering should be like national service, since you learn about prioritisation, teamwork, forward planning etc very quickly.

Offices, by comparison, seem to foster a malignancy that is almost tangible at times, to the point that home workers are said to be some of the most experienced and highly qualified office workers you can get. One outsourcing company, whose name I unfortunately forgot, cited the statistics and it was quite staggering.

These homeworkers saw the light.

As someone who has done a very wide variety of jobs, 80 hours of something you enjoy is a lot easier than 35 hours of something that sucks your soul.

I wrote and removed a post on the art of management when I first met Little Shiva. It became apparent in the following weeks that he probably didn’t understand a word of it. He was being dictated to by a person with a fairly advanced disorder, however, and given the stature of this person, I am not surprised that I was not to be listened to.

A good manager empowers their staff rather than intimidating them into doing things out of fear. This is very basic. In order to do your job well you are supposed to take things like retraining and staff turnover into account.

It is also your job as a manager to make yourself dispensable, that is to say, to ensure that if you have to be somewhere else, the work is getting done. This means that throughout your day, you should be ensuring that your team are aware of the tasks required and doing them without prompting.

A manager’s function is to be a buffer between staff and senior management, not to generate friction. This means as a functional adult, you should be prepared to mediate between staff and to deal with your own problems.

In a banking situation, of course, you have the complication of the bank. Any relationship in a bank is between you, the bank and then the person. This, however, does not negate your responsibility to communicate with your staff. In fact, you should be making sure that everyone understands that their relationship is also with the bank before anyone else. It is a basic principle of risk management.

In the event that you are hiring, you should have received some bias training. Most of the major banks provide this, although I have been discriminated against because of my previous experience as a carer, because I am female and likely to procreate, because I am too interesting twice now – the first time I was told that the bank did not need cultural change (I had not mentioned any plans to single-handedly change an international bank, this was apparently a charisma issue) because I am creative (this time I was chased by a woman screaming), and finally because I am not a mother. At this point I made a complaint, knowing full well that the only likely response was that the bank would repeat the same rubbish that their demotivated interviewer had made up.

Because my first career was as a chef, I find it extremely easy to prioritise tasks as back burner or front burner items. It is a very simple analogy and a question of time-management.

The most difficult thing about offices generally, however, is that people in a seated position are vindictive and lazy after quite a short time. Cliques form, and self-interest creates deep suspicion if you express any interest in work whatsoever. This is something I have found extremely boring over the years. Nobody wants to deal with enthusiasm, nor do they understand why their assumptions about you are wrong. They just invent something else to bitch about.

So, if your office staff turnover is high, and your staff look miserable, replace the manager, because they are not doing the job effectively. Employ someone with some leadership capacity that actually likes working, not someone that looks like you. That would be a first.

motivation

Explaining yourself

November 24, 2019 No Comments

I think we are into double figures for narcs and other cluster B candidates staring at the website now. These are just the ones I know about.

The latest addition to the mob doesn’t understand what is going on and tells me that this is my fault. He doesn’t seem to understand that it doesn’t actually matter.

So, for those drop-ins that wonder what is going on:

I actually live a very quiet life, mostly focusing on work since I used to believe work was a comparatively safe place. It isn’t, but it is still more interesting to have adventures at work than directly emotional adventures, which are also more hazardous.

A lot of the posts contain very little overt information, unless you happen to be the other person.

Little Shiva gets a lot of posts, because he is lonely and a little OCD and we have got into a habit. He likes looking at it, and I like to see him looking at it. Things could have been very different if he had made different choices, and I am happy for him that nothing was really disrupted his end.

Bawbag drops in if I happen to talk about his artwork, because bawbag expects me to be like him and indulge in very negative feelings. He has never understood, for example, that it really doesn’t matter to me whether he finds me attractive or not as we don’t have that kind of relationship at all. I did try to explain to him that all my friends have always been male, but he didn’t really get it because he thinks in terms of women as unruly cats and men as rather inept custodians of said cats.

Wolfe likes to check on me every now and again, to see if I have made progress towards the biggest goal, which was rather curtailed by Little Shiva and Twisty preventing me from doing the Boris project.

Boris checks rarely now, but was very kind to me and I am happy to see he doesn’t need me at present.

Grumpy Dude is busy having an actual life, so I don’t expect he is looking at it at all.

Whether you personally understand the line of thought does not matter in the slightest. It isn’t actually designed to particularly appeal to other people.

Hope that makes things clearer for you.

Normal people do not rant for over a month at people for disagreeing with them on a facebook thread, by the way. That is obsessive behaviour.

motivation

Today

November 22, 2019 No Comments

This beautiful man stopped by the car for the second time. I love looking at him, but if he knew that I think he would be extremely surprised. He is very welcome to stand and be looked at at any time.

I do wish he wasn’t drunk, however as he has a terrible tendency towards talking nonsense, and he has now told me that he is Jewish about 97 times. I am not sure why this is quite so important, but he has a a nice wicked thing going on that I evidently like seeing. Like a raven haired Wolfe.

Apart from that, almost finished sorting out some practical problems, and am doing some work towards the reclusive lifestyle I mentioned yesterday.

Bawbag has finished his shopfront, I am sure it is a work of artistic genius. I am not sure that mac owners will quite believe it. It is certainly different.

Finished a lot of ephemera for Haram Bawbag the artwork, too cold to do much with it at present. I will see if I get a day off this week whether I can find enough jumpers to persist with it.

Cushions moving forward at pace, but very time consuming and I have had to purchase specifics for them, which is a pain.

Looking forward to moving things on shortly.

motivation

Humanity is not worth saving

November 19, 2019 No Comments

Many years ago, after the island I built for Patrick McGoohan, I started a book. It morphed over time into a kind of state of society critique, and when I first met Wolfe, he was the person I wanted to discuss this book with.

I never did get to discuss it with him, because he was always in trivial mode when I spoke to him, and despite being extremely helpful in other ways, it proved impossible to get a simple direct conversation online. That is Ok, he wasn’t to know.

I had a massive crisis in confidence after the incident with him, to the point of almost a form of breakdown. I was taking care of my mother and working various tiny contracts, did some geo work for GPS systems and such, wasn’t idle, but could not bring myself to write the book until I could fathom what exactly the stuff with Wolfe had triggered.

I am very glad that I was patient about that, because it created a lot of new work, worked through a number of things although it did not allow me to actually do the initial job of writing the book.

Likewise I still have work to do on the visual novel, although I will need to data scrape a hard drive or two to get moving again on that.

Since my mother died, and even as she was dying, I learned a lot about humans that I had tried hard to forget.

With a very small number of exceptions every single person I have met since 2016 has been venal, stupid, vitriolic and has made absolutely no attempt to even appear to be anything else. I am now quite satisfied that humanity should wipe itself out. Probably the sooner the better.

Be aware of the effect you have on other people. I was originally a cynical and shy lady, after Wolfe I became a positive, relaxed and confident person. Apparently this offends stupid people, to the point it is now impossible to even do anything well and avoid censure from them.

I am now seeking out ways of avoiding people altogether and instead of having the career I worked for, I will be prioritising the avoidance of any more worthless people. They are a waste of time.

I am not entirely unhappy with this outcome, but it seems rather a waste of some very good material.

creativity, motivation

The deadline for Haram Bawbag

November 15, 2019 No Comments

At last we have a deadline upon us, so I am busy making oodles of things for Haram Bawbag.

I will be attempting to remove it from the studio to figure out if I have to dismantle before doing too much more to it, as it would be a shame to make it only to have it trapped in the studio.

This may seem like a rookie error, but it is the nature of the work that I had to attach the top whilst working on it. Fortunately the style I seem to be developing is such that it will not be hard to reassemble in the other studio.

The cushions are going well, but there is a long way to go and I think the Grumpy Dude Collection is not likely to be complete until the spring. The shoes are likely to be spring/summer, even with constant work.

Little Shiva is in the pile for heavy work before going down for resining, so it is at a standstill at the moment, which is driving me a little bit crazy as I would love to see it finished. You can’t rush these things though, and I have several stained glass windows to make.

Yes, I am aware that you are in London. Nice to see you. This is becoming ridiculous. It has been 18 months since we last saw each other. Have you found your balls yet?

Anyway, since Haram Bawbag is likely to be the first to finish, and I am planning on doing some posters/stickers of absolutely everything since people are too lazy to click on the website, I will be starting work on the story of Haram Bawbag, which is way stranger than anything I could come up with.

Nevertheless, I will add my usual gloss to it, and so it is likely to be comedic.

Bawbag managed to attract my attention for 30 seconds today. Since he is likely to follow this up by getting someone to read my post:

We were friends for three weeks, during which you were extremely selfish and for some reason seemed to want to take things from me even as I was giving you a gift. Given your outrageous wealth, I have absolutely no idea why you felt the need to do this, but it was entirely unnecessary. You now own a piece of work which I do not give a shit about as it is unfinished and substandard. The piece of work I am now constructing in its place is neither of those things, and I will be retailing it at £15,000. I will be using power tools and rolling around on the floor if I feel like it in the course of making it.

I imagine you are trying to insinuate yourself into my attention bubble because you think I will come and do your shopfront. Ain’t gonna happen, not even if you offered me a huge wad of cash for doing it, which of course you wouldn’t. I have every respect for your parsimony, but you aren’t going to be taking anything from me ever again.

I do not know why you seem to want negative reactions from people, but it is not helpful. You would have to want to change to be worth talking to, and you neither want to, nor see the need to because of your tedious money. Therefore I do not think we have anything further to discuss.

I am sorry that’s the way it is. I am not your ex wife, nor am I interested. You are mildly cute and once a month or so you are amusing. The rest is a disaster.

One of the happiest moments of my life was removing your toilet. Unfortunately you were there.

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