After today, I might have to get one. I knew already that people CAN take decent pictures on them – Jemima’s website Jebaloo, or London: mostly through an iphone can testify. Her blog proves the good ishot is not just a fluke, even if it takes an ex-professional photographer to coax more than motion blur from the very basic photo function. If you’re still sceptical, more proof positive exits in the form of 100 amazing iphone photos by people who are also obscenely good. But it was only when my Smena 8M packed up (okay, I forgot that you have to do EVERYTHING on the charming Soviet fucker and wrecked yet another film by exposing to light) and I didn’t have any 35mm film that I borrowed an iphone to do some test shots.

To my surprise, it picked up more than pixels. Even better, when the jpegs were dropped into photoshop, they didn’t look absolutely terrible…

French twins. Impeccably dressed in matching cream raincoats and black drainpipe jeans, both toted carrier bags from the same shop (Joy) and whipped out matching Moleskin notebooks to take notes on artists they liked. Awesome.

Raincoats = de rigeur

The complete wanker below must have a great phsyio. He reclined motionless – presumably in rapture – for long enough to do damage to the majority of his vertebrae and confuse the little girl who tried to copy his contortions.

It’s pretty clear the art wasn’t the primary reason for his visit…

If the thought of being ogled puts you off public displays of art you can always stare in wonder at the hoarding on the building site at the back of the Tate Modern, just off Park Street. The illustrator who did this either comes from a distant solar system or has a worryingly warped view of the homeless, as the caption ‘resting on the bridge’ reveals. For future linguistic reference, perceptive illustrator, the verb ‘resting’ connotes sleep or relaxation after exertion, not ‘rough sleeping’.

However, the most visually interesting thing in Southwark at the moment can’t be found in or near a gallery. It has no funding and is of no interest to the art world. Shame. The Bricklayer’s Arms bus stop on the New Kent Road is both easy to get to and quite a smart statement.

Vague Music Tuesday:

1) Success - Girl From New Orleans
French Indie band on Platinum Records: www.myspace.com/herecomessuccess

2) Fat Freddy’s Drop - Flashback (From ‘Based on a True Story’)
7 piece live Dub/Reggae band from Wellington, NZ: www.fatfreddysdrop.com/

3) James Yorkston – Woozy with Cider
Folk from Fife with James Yorkston and the Athletes: www.jamesyorkston.co.uk

I met him during a heavy summer when the city air smelled like hot trash , the crazies spilled onto the streets and the women, out of their shorts.

There was no preamble. He just sat down next to me, fixed me with a steady stare and said:

"Son, no matter what you think about your situation, it's wrong."

His handlebar moustache, fashioned carelessly from the stained remnants of a million battered phrenologsists, was a discredited relic from the Victorian era now packed into all of the toyhouse warehouses and lorry cabs permitted in an era that values eggs called 'Kinder' rather than actually practising the virtue. Wherever it was from, it interested me more than his stranger's slurred diagnosis of a situation I knew nothing about.

"Have we met?" My only response to unsolicited analysis in basements selling moonshine.

He was undeterred.

"I've done a lot of things I'm not proud of. Decisions made, you know...they were the wrong ones. But this I do know, and you should know it too. For my - many - regrets, the best times I've ever had were making them."

Something about that last sentence rang true and I wanted suddenly to ask him to listen...nod his whiskers and watch his potted middle jiggle in acquiesence to my adolescent woes. But he'd finished, stooped down and started trying to eat the shards of glass embedded in the manuka-glazed, beermat-varnished floortiles. After that, I was kinda too scared to talk to him.