my life as a artist
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it furthers one to cross the great water
Saturday 7th July 2007 5:20 PM
So, the black Mazda is being swallowed by four and a half million fluid ounces of floodwater and I'm lustily singing the theme tune to Stingray, but it's not doing any good. Like the Mazda's screaming engine my mind is racing. What would Troy Tempest do? If only Marina was here! I remember her so well. She was like Brigitte Bardot with gills.
Then suddenly, in a flash, all of a sudden, out of the blue, with no warning, something happened really quickly. Gradually, slowly, bit by bit, imperceptibly at the beginning but quite a lot towards the end, it began to dawn on me that I was evoking the wrong craft! I thought Stingray could go underwater, on land and in the air, but I was wrong. Stingray was only a submarine. Admittedly, it was a fantastic submarine, but it was only a submarine. By evoking it I had unwittingly been encouraging the Mazda towards total submersion, in its understandable search for elemental self-expression.
Supercar! Of course! That's what was needed! Supercar could travel underwater, on land and in the air! I sang. 'Der, der, der, der, der, der, der, der, dum, di, di, der!' It was as though my mind was a ten-inch flat-pressed disc of vinyl with the theme tune from Supercar engraved on it, it's inward spiral only awaiting the stylus of active memory. I knew then that I was Mike Mercury, and if I was going to survive, I had to let my inner-Doctor Beaker take over.
The effects of my heartfelt singing were almost instantaneous. The tyres of the Supercar Mazda started to grip on solid earth, and as she regained a sense of direction and purpose, the thin band of light at the top of the windscreen started to broaden. Although I was missing the dreamy sensual elegance of Marina, it felt more appropriate to be in the practical hands of my inner-Doctor Beaker.
Soon the Mazda's breathless bumper was breaking into light, and while it's grinning radiator grill was greedily and gratefully gulping the cooling air of the late Mid-Wales afternoon, its side-panels were shining like the flanks of a new-born foal. Giddy with the gift of new life, we climbed the steep valley side, zig-zag wanderers moving towards a new future and Betys-y-crwn, (Betsy Croon), both of us yearning for a cup of tea and a gentle rub-down with a genuine chamois leather. As we reached the brow of the hill I could see Pat's cottage, squatting defiantly against the rain, just over the next rise. The lights were on and her car was there!
Later that evening, in front of a roaring log fire, I told Pat all about our traumatic journey, and as the third cup of Lapsang souchong gurgled into the Mazda's radiator, and my aching body thrilled to the touch of genuine chamois leather, we both agreed that I shouldn't have taken the sign to Beguildy.
Posted 5:20 PM | 2 Comments | Permalink
when the boat comes in
Friday 6th July 2007 1:11 AM
First of all, I'd like to express my appreciation to Barbara Cartland for her elegant comments, subsequent to Tuesdays blog. Thank you Ma'am! Clive James once said your eyes looked like two crows that had flown into the white cliffs of Dover.
Tuesday's blog, entitled 'Wales is a small country, roughly the size of Wales', was unusual, in that it finished on a cliff-hanger. ( the fact that 'cliff' has been mentioned twice now, unrelatedly, and in two consecutive sentences, is not meant to imply a theme or sub-text. It's sheer chance). In a postscript to this tense, thrilling and unlogoffable blog, I promised some sort of revelation, to be posted today. It was a rash and foolish thing to do, and I regret it. With all the crosswords and pottering I have to do, I've got enough pressure in my life already.
Imagine, if you will, that I'm Charles Dickens, cyber-space is the Atlantic ocean, and you're waiting at Tilbury docks, with jellied eels and rickets, for the next instalment-bearing liner. Well, my loyal yet cruelly betrayed reader, that instalment-bearing liner's not coming in tonight, because it's been boarded, mid-Azores, by a bunch of morally ambiguous pirates, led by Johnny Depp. These mysterious, marine vagabonds are in this case analogous to those life- events that hi-jack the smooth running of things.
Keira Knightly, who is my will-power, is going to try and persuade Johnny Depp to let the boat continue to Tilbury. Although initially repulsed by his personal hygiene and confused as to his moral status, she's developing a powerful erotic kinship with him, and I expect them to have sex by the weekend, in which case the instalment-ship-metaphor should be sailing in on Saturday/ Sunday. Until then, from me, standing on the poop, avast behind to you all!
Posted 1:11 AM | 3 Comments | Permalink
wales is a small country roughly the size of wales
Tuesday 3rd July 2007 11:35 PM
After a daring dawn escape from the cosmic miasma of the Glastonbury festival, my brother and I found ourselves in a Little Chef eating egg, beans and chips at 8:30 in the morning. We had little napkins and everything. After a nice cup of tea I went to the men's room and washed the tent.
I took my specially spattered mud-brother to pick up his car, which he'd left outside my old mate Richard's house in the magnificently named village of Temple Cloud, then I boldly set the Mazda on course, at maximum warp 7, for planet Mid-Wales.
Having successfully scoured star-system Bristol for an elusive co-op bank to put my winnings in, I manoeuvred my kinky machine towards the M5 super-space highway. It took nearly an hour to get there, due to the heavy rain and a slight skirmish with some klingons in Westbury-on-Trym.
As soon as I'd established my craft in the super-space highway slow lane, I lit a cigarette and engaged the on-board music facilitator. Outside the cold rain was falling, but inside, diaphanous curlicues of warm smoke were rising, enwreathing and caressing the sweet bubbles of honey that were popping from the throat of Smokey Robinson, who was now really, really little and living in a box in the dashboard.
Herefordshire and the Borders were an elemental theme-park, the main attraction being water. Forced onto debris-strewn and flooded B roads by the closure of the A49, the journey became too bitty and fractured to continue the Star Trek imagery. This was Stingray land! (Stingray was a documentary on the telly that I used to watch as a kid, about a suppository-shaped car that could travel underwater and in the air)
Five miles and twenty thousand Olympic-size swimming pools of rain beyond Clun, I took a sign to Beguildy, and then put it in the boot before anyone saw me. Having committed this pointless and motiveless crime I turned off the B road and onto an F road which turned into a 'Gee, where's the road?' The switchback across the valley bottom appeared to be under two foot, or is it feet?. Foot, feet, it doesn't really matter does it? I should have stuck to foot, like chewing gum, and even though it might have been grammatically incorrect, at least I wouldn't have destroyed the narrative tension like I've done now. If it's all right with you I'll start that sentence again, OK?
The switchback across the valley bottom appeared to be under four and a half million fluid ounces of water, and as the panting Mazda thrust its firm bumper into the yielding flood, the undercarriage and side panels gave an involuntary shudder of fear and revulsion. Bow waves of brown water were breaking in spumes of vengeance over the black bulging bonnet of the Mazda, and as she plunged deeper, and ever more committed, into that dark watery hell, I heard my mobile bleeping with a message.
Still gunning the Mazda in first gear, I reached across to the passenger seat to pick up the mobile. The huge body of water was trying to force me off the road, and as my powerful right forearm, sculpted from granite and forested with manly furze, wrestled with the steering wheel, my muscular yet sensitive left hand manipulated the fashionably small keys of the mobile. It was a message from my friend Pat, whose cottage I was hopefully going to stay in that night.
It said ' Don't take the sign to Beguildy'
'Botty, busters and wee wee' I cursed childishly, under my breath. The deathly water was now up to the bottom of the windscreen and I could feel the tyres struggling to keep a grip on terra firma. I struggled frantically for Stingray imagery but all I could remember was the theme tune. Lustily I sang. ' Der, der, der, der der, der…….' but it wasn't doing any good. As the last strip of light disappeared from the windscreen I felt the car starting to float……
I'm off to bed now. I'll tell you what happened on Thursday... but don't worry, because everything turned out fine. (again)
Posted 11:35 PM | 204 Comments | Permalink
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
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