The Avant-Garde has died?

I find myself, once again, sipping a coffee at Sandbanks cafe. I heard that, yes it is a local coffee shop for me. Life is full of strange happenings but for me sitting here, helps me find the other side of life which is worth thinking about and then putting down my thoughts. Most will be scrapped and a few make it through.

It's a century since Marcel Duchamp submitted his artwork called Fountain to an exhibition staged by the Society of Independent Artists in New York. Fountain was a urinal, signed R.Mutt. I touched on this in my blog 'Art, when it is Art' in May this year. Now we see this urinal as Avant-Garde. Spirit of experimentation and confrontation. In the intervening years, art, has lost its ability to deliver that shock factor, we seem to have seen it all before.

Like buying War and Peace, with every intention of reading it, but in all those years it has sat there, we have only read the spine. Maybe the world is so full of exciting new surprises, Avant-Garde is another concept that just did not keep up. I think the avant-garde is still in all of us but like the spine we only read, we have become creatures of our time and we have let technology rob us of creation.  

Some say my writing is too avant-garde for my readers: I hope it is innovative, advanced, innovatory, original, experimental, inventive, ahead of the times. Long live the avant-garde.

I am watching the British Offshore rowing championship, these are sea going rowing boats, not sure what that is all about. It is pouring with rain here with a brisk breeze. Anyway, they are valiantly surging through the choppy water and rounding the buoys to complete the course. From what I can gather they come from far and wide, even Wales. I suppose most come from seaside towns as I would not expect to see those from the valleys, taking up rowing as a sport. 

This championship is to decide who goes to the world championship later this year, great boost for Sandbanks and Poole. 

Except for those that have to be on the beach the rest are in the cafe trying to stay dry and warm, must admit they do all look a little miserable and wet. This looks like a sport for the young and energetic, far too much effort for me.

 Age moves steadily on and it is something like pushing the ocean back with a broom. Briefly you hold a little at bay then it returns.