my life as a artist
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good flood and mud buddies
Sunday 1st July 2007 8:37 PM
Apologies, oh faithful and loyal blog-checkers, for the recent lack of contribution. Over the last two weeks I've been flirting with the non-cyber world to the point of rutting. I've been on a savage journey through the sodden seas of Somerset and the muddy mire of Mid-Wales, performing at the Glastonbury festival and the Workhouse festival respectively, respectably and respectfully.
I've got tinnitus, sleep deprivation and calf muscles like a Nepalese sherpa, but I know it would have been much worse if I hadn't gone in for some serious pre-festival training during the previous week. I stopped washing, brought the porta-potti in from the shed and put it in the middle of the caravan, had four sound systems playing different music at the same time, covered the floor with eighteen inches of crunchy peanut butter and started getting stoned straight after breakfast.
At Glastonbury, on Friday, attendances at the fringe events were low. It seems everybody was there to watch the famous bands on the big stages, like the Arctic Chiefs, the Stereograms or Coldcream or whatever. At midnight in the cabaret marquee (capacity 4,000) there were about fifty people. Usually, at that time, there's a dangerous, foul-mouthed comic, abusing and rebel-rousing a heaving, steaming mass of out-of-it, into-it people. This time it looked like a cancelled scout jamboree.
I did a gig in the early evening in the same tent. There was about six or seven hundred in but they felt virtual. Had the ticketing system ensured a festival full of robotic techno-nerds or were they all first-timers, not used to smoking pot in the afternoon? Reassuringly, there were three openly laughing people sat right in front of me. I think their presence stopped me from saying, 'Obviously, this stuff works better in front of a live audience…'
To my surprise I got an encore. Apparently they were being quietly appreciative. 'You were really funny…. It was all I could do to keep from laughing'. Half an hour later I was on stage again, doing ten minutes for a radio 4 thing called 'four in a field'.
Because it was a comedy programme coming from the Glastonbury festival, and because I'm over fifty years old now, I asked the producer if it was OK to mention a certain fondness for cannabis, and he said no. Ah well. As it happens, I can be funny without mentioning cannabis, but sadly, on this particular occasion, I wasn't.
On the Saturday the fringe venues started perking up, as people discovered the myriad, muddy and magical delights of the green fields, and the benefit, to both the bowels and the eternal soul, of a plate of proper food from the Buddhafields café.
On the Sunday I got an unscheduled gig, which happily fell an hour before another unscheduled gig by the splendid Bill Bailey, thus ensuring a packed tent, full of people who don't mind hippies. Mmm, lovely. Taking a tip from Dame Burly Chassis, I did the gig in a loose, firm-thigh-revealing chiffon number and a pair of diamond encrusted wellies, and mainly stuck to show tunes.
Me and Nick, my brother in blood and mud, got an early night so we could make a daring dawn escape on the Monday morning. Ear-plugs are no match for sound systems that can make your internal organs bounce up and down in your ribcage, so next year we're taking lead caskets. As we drifted off to sleep we could hear the Who, even though the pyramid stage was miles and miles and miles…….
Posted 8:37 PM | 2 Comments | Permalink
life, life, death be damned
Friday 15th June 2007 11:30 PM
Regular readers of this blog, who are, according to my webstats, my old mate Kev, my brother Simon and my stalker, (who's name I eventually hope to discover, but not, I hope, in a thrillingly bloody climax that'd make a good feature in a bio-pic), will imagine they already know how I feel about the artist Demon Hurts. In fact I'm quite torn, split down the middle, the severed entrails of my artistic taste are glistening in the formaldehyde-filled tank of ambivalence. On the one hand I think it's empty, pretentious, cynical and derivative, but on the other hand I think it's rubbish.
If Demon had had the decent good manners to ask all those dissected sheep and cows what sort of art they preferred, I feel sure that most of them would have said landscapes. Rather than evisceration and humiliation (and aggravation to our nation, suicide, too many pills, everyone's moving to the hills, it's a ball of confusion) I think those sheep and cows would have preferred a) to live, and b) to see representations of themselves via some sort of medium, manipulated with technique and imagination. You know, that art stuff.
Due to the singular nature of rural arts funding in this part of the world, it's estimated that over 20% of visitors to art galleries in North Yorkshire are sheep and cows. I think we have a duty of care to our lowly cattle, especially the young calves and innocent lambs, and it is incumbent upon us to provide them with sound aesthetic nourishment, as well as good grazing and ear-tags. ( I'm getting a message through my headphones that 'encumbent' has just won this weeks prestigious 'Nicest word to say in blog' award)
As for Demon's latest exhibition, 'For the love of Demon Hurts and Money' I am rendered peachless. There's no rosy glow of life here, no generous curve of soft sensuality, no kernels of truth, no sweetness, no juice, only the cheap saccharine dust of dry sixth-form death. The centipede of the exhibition is an ethically sourced goth disco-ball, reputed to have cost fourteen million pounds to make. It's rumoured that George Michael, who's really into disco, is going to buy it for fifty million pounds (plus postage and packing). I think George needs to take his protein pills and put his helmet on, while Demon needs to leave the capsule if he dare.
So here am I, sitting in a tin-can caravan, just above the earth,
planet Earth is blue, and there's plenty I can do……
Posted 11:30 PM | 4 Comments | Permalink
the aisles of silly
Sunday 10th June 2007 6:38 PM
This morning went to the car-boot sale at the racecourse with my mum, who bought two singing stuffed toy animals. One was Miss Piggy, but with purple hair extensions, ( which, to be honest, made her look a bit cheap), singing 'I will survive' in the style of Gloria Gaynor. The other was a frog, not Kermit, doing 'Wonderful World' by Louis Armstrong, with a very impressive lip tremble at the end. Both of them made me realise how far I'd come from those lost days of innocence and longing, when the soundtrack to my life was Billy Bass the singing fish.
I bought a sofa (that was slim enough to go through the caravan door) for a tenner, from this bloke who said he was a time-lord. He said he'd only bought the sofa next year and he'd hardly used it, and it was no problem to deliver it. He had a Time And Relative Dimension In Space machine, in the form of a 1982 Fiat Uno, which he said was surprisingly roomy in the back. I told him I was in all day last Thursday, so why didn't he deliver it then?
Me and my mum went halves on a two-for-one deal on seventeen cherry plum tomatoes, while I went whole on a one-for-one deal on twenty-three locally grown strawberries. Triumphant in the knowledge that we had bought forty pieces of red food for less than seven pence an item, we strode confidently on, my mothers proud bosom like the prow of an ice-breaker, cracking a savage zig-zag path through an undiscovered continent of bargains.
I paid two quid for a dark brown candlewick bedspread, to use as a throw for the sofa I got delivered last Thursday. Brown is a very underrated colour. Most basic life-sustaining stuff seems to be brown, like bread, rice, tea, Austin Maxis, monks, porrage, wood and soil, but exciting things come in brown as well, such as coffee, chocolate, whiskey, cannabis, beer and souped-up Austin Maxis. I don't know much about interior fashion but I think brown could be the new red.
I bought a buff coloured pair of 80% linen trousers from a Frenchman called Jean Paul. As I tried to haggle him down to a pound, our exchanges started taking a metaphysical turn, and before long I found myself outlining the plot of a novel about a pair of buff 80% linen trousers and an explosive secret that could rock the Catholic church to it's foundations.
After a brief lunch of brie and rocket salad with 'tarte au pomme' for afters, washed down with an arrogantly fruity Bordeaux claret, we discussed the price of the trousers over a keenly fought but friendly game of boules. I let him win the boules and he sold me the trousers for a pound.
As me and my mum, laden with two score of red fruit and bedspreads besides, made our weary way back to the car, we noticed the time-lord who'd sold me the sofa, sitting in a red 1982 Fiat Uno. He was reading a book and I could just make out the title and author. It was 'La mystere du pantalons crème' by Jean Paul Scribbleur. The next thing I heard was three enormously loud electronic trumpetings, as the Fiat Uno shimmered and faded, and ultimately disappeared, into the mute mystery of another dimension, hopefully, with my sofa.
When we got back to my mum's, I tried on the buff trousers (they're a little too long) and then we ate red food and listened to Miss Piggy and the generic 3-D cartoon frog do their thing. It's a wonderful world, and I will survive.
Posted 6:38 PM | 6 Comments | Permalink
the answer is in the soul
Wednesday 6th June 2007 12:12 AM
Hello faithful blogwatchers… through the cold immensity of cyber-space you've been cyber-flocking like cyber-birds to my cyber-feeder and there's been no cyber-seeds or cyber-crumbs for over a week. What you thought was a cyber-desert was in fact just a cyber-beach, and now the cyber-tide is rolling in…
Oh I do like to be the cyber-sea-side,
Oh I do like to be the cyber-sea,
Oh I do like to scroll along the prom, prom, prom,
Where the broadband plays, tiddly, om, pom, pom!
I'm sorry for the lack of recent nourishment but it's just that I've been in another world this last week. It's the non-cyber world and it's really different there. In that other world there's a lot more liquid. Apparently liquid can't survive in cyber-space, whereas the other world positively gushes with blood, sweat, tears, semen, dribble, wee-wee and John Smith's.
It's a messy place and it's always good to have some absorbent kitchen towels handy. The other world's a lot harder as well. Some of it's made out of metal and it can really hurt. Some of it though, is made out of hazelnut, and although that's quite hard at first, you can crush it down with your teeth and mix it with saliva and it's quite nice.
In fact, one of the best things about the other world is the muesli. In cyber-space, as far as I know, you can only get Alpen, whereas in the other world there's a wholefood shop, called Alligator, where you can buy seven different types of delicious muesli, from attractive human staff who only gush blood, sweat, tears, semen, dribble, wee-wee and John Smith's when they're not serving behind the counter.
The other world is hard and messy and got good muesli but cyber-space is fantastic for wildlife. Yesterday I had a googled woodpecker virtually eating out of my hand…..
So blogwatcher… this is it… this is what you came for…. It's not much, I know… maybe a few crumbs and possibly a seed….. I recommend you eat the crumbs but if you find a seed, I suggest you put it under your wing and take it back to your cyber-garden and plant it in a glazed cyber-pot filled with the compost of your own experience. Tender it, nurture it, feed it with Alpen, and in a few weeks you might produce a sprouting blogwort, one of the hardiest, most beautiful flowers of the arctic cyber-steppes. Happy gardening!
Posted 12:12 AM | 3 Comments | Permalink
did the earth move for you?
Monday 28th May 2007 10:36 PM
In response to one of last week's blogs, Les Miserable writes:
'Big diggers don't have genitals, why dress them in lingerie?'
'When there's so many other things to be getting on with', one might add. Well Les, it's a good question, and one that I'm going to try and answer.
1) Lingerie is not necessarily for covering genitals, sometimes it draws attention to them, or enhances them in some way.
2) Surprisingly, some big diggers do have genitals. The 25-ton CAT 330C excavator has a small willy, just behind the rock-ripper attachment, on certain export models.
3) I feel that out-size lingerie lends an erotic mystery to most earth-moving equipment. Even with it's saucy high lift tailgates and spillboards, it's amazing what a floor-skimming zebra-print negligee, in sheer mesh with ruffle trim, can do for a 35-ton articulated dumptruck.
4) It makes big diggers feel special.
5) It helps the economy. (Pointless things often do.)
Think about it Les, and maybe give it a go. I started with a provocatively placed handkerchief on my lawnmower, and went on from there. Good Luck!
Posted 10:36 PM | 2 Comments | Permalink
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