I got back to London this evening from a short sojourn in Northern Ireland. My flight back coincided nicely with a lunar eclipse - as I got to the airport I saw a shadow form over a lower corner of the big full moon - and by the time I had got to Gatwick a pink shadow had crossed over it fully - making this a rather special New Year's Eve.....suddenly everything feels new: a new year, a New Year and winter remains ...as it should, with partial snow.  Yesterday my nephew and I went to see Avatar - a quite amazing experience.....maybe there is future in film..I dreamt last night that London had cheetahs swmming in the Thames and elephants on its banks. 

I recently met a chemistry professor at Imperial College who is investigating the subtle differences between representation and meaning.....his blog shows some images which look like snowflakes but which are apparently 'Clar islands....found not so much in an ocean, but in a type of molecule known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH)' and he talks of how 'one member of this class, graphene, .is 'attracting a lot of attention recently as a potential material for use in computer chips'....

I also visited artist Liliane Lijn's studio last week where she had a birthday party amidst her formidable poetic and kinetic sculptures including one that breathed fire and one that discharged dry ice. Among the other guests were Barry Miles of the infamous Indica Gallery (back in London swinging 60s, famous for its Pink Floyd light performances as well as the place where Yoko met Johnny Lennon among many other thing) and Pearce Marchbank the graphic designer whose works graced OZ magazine before its close. One of the conversational strands now many years later is the high trading price of OZ mags on e-bay; I also met someone who is working at Maggs the rare books shop and gallery in Berkeley Square in London which is specialising in works (also at quite high prices) about urban terror, revolution, agitation, propaganda and countercuture.....seems like the prices if not the value of such strategies are growing higher and higher in these perhaps curiously counter-counter-culture times....

London is sharpening for snow and if it comes it will coincide with the feasts which are going on formally and informally across this recession-hit city: this week before Christmas people go out to reap the remnants and residue of the year gone by. This year the arts world (or what is left of it) has decided to hold events to mark a transfer from one era to another. Last night, at the veritable Toynbee Hall off Brick Lane and Petticoat Lane in east London, the remarkable arts management organisation - Artadmin - celebrated thirty years of its existence, as the leading support agency for work which sits merrily in the cracks between live art, visual performance, performance art, dance and collaborative practice. Lined up in the room for a stirring performance of voice with handbells (a beautiful rap on the theme of ding dong) by Graeme Millar were zillions of luminaries who have benefited from Artsadmin -  from Julian Maynard Smith of Station House Opera to Anne Bean, to Gary Stevens, Dan Ackroyd, Nicola Triscott, Ghislaine Boddington, Hugo Glendinning, Lois Keidan, Michael Atavar, Silvia Ziranek - a poem written by John Fox and Sue Gill from Welfare State was read to mark the moment and in a dark performance spaces participants were invited to participate in a capsule performance - to hold three tiny pieces of thistledown in our hands and to blow these around in whatever fashion we wished together or alone but to hold them for a few minutes and not to leave these behind but to return them safely when we chose to end.  We all left the event clasping a new book to mark this key anniversary with sublime pictures by Hugo Glendinning made with many of the artists connected with Artsadmin based on sites within Toynbee Hall - it opens with a piece from the Bow Gamelan Ensemble (we recall that sadly Paul Burwell was absent from last night's reverie) which  includes five pictures made by Glendinning with Tim Etchells called Live Forever with small letters carved from ice which performs appropriately melting into water at the close. I had noticed in the room that artists often do not appear older just perhaps harder as the years evolve - like diamonds hardening into their images and their manifold identities and as a group, they take joy in occasionally warming themselves on the common path taking time out for an hour or so of real celebration for survival on the journey thanking people like Artsadmin who somehow make ephemeral work take place and have presence in an all too solid world.