What is all this mess here?

(if anyone else here uses beta blogger and, like me, has lost the compose function on their blog, ie the font/picture/quote/url toolbar, gimme a shout if you worked out how to get it back. thanx. NO WORRIES, GOT IT SORTED.)

New Day – let’s try again…

So this morning I learnt the haka – well an approximation of the haka – in preparation for chloe’s play. I can’t imagine what her tutor is gonna think but it’s novel at least and fits really well... boldly ushers in the darkness and violence of the crucifixion to the tale.

So this morning was a fun experience, and fascinating: sparking off thoughts this afternoon on what we understand by male and female aggression… the posture so definitely masculine, the moving body hunched forward and over, almost gorilla like, and the grunts pulled up from low in the body… this is a dance with balls… come on if you think you’re hard enough… we’re gonna slaughter you and smash your infants upon the rocks… I didn’t think I was much of a girly-girl ‘til this morning I tried to imitate a 16 stone rugby player. Even in stomper boots, the body held with too great poise, posture too straight and balletic… movements too flowing, where the limbs should be jabbing, stabbing, punching… we need goliath bulk, not Davidic grace… our throats lower and roughen, our faces scowl to threaten… words spat from a growling throat…

With black masks covering our faces we are hitching our skirts mimicking an oldtime act of female aggression (apparently this was once upon a time in our own culture considered frightening enough to ward off intruders… look what I have under here – it’ll bite if you come any closer, trespassers will be prosecuted)… bending spread knees to stamp and grunt…the mob baying for blood… welcoming death and violence… demanding sacrafice. There is nothing in this story for the tender hearted… they whipped and they stripped and they strung him

Cleansed the soul… invigorated and channelled out that which was choking the throat yesterday… an enemy without or within, I don’t quite know, but all that shouting and stamping this morning was cathartic in a primal way…

::

Oddly appropriate advent listening

Listening to the Prefuse73 T5 soul sessions Vol 1.
At 14mins48secs a familiar strain comes, and the mind fills in the invisible lyrics

God rest you merry gentlemen,
Let nothing you dismay
For Jesus Christ our Saviour
Was born upon this day

And then a voice joins to sing a latin american sounding variation on the old classic,

They killed someone else in the hot sun of a Christmas day…

I have no idea what that’s about… but it’s something about something…

::

Enclosed and Exposed

Been working this past few days on the themes of family and our visible and hidden selves within family, in the initial stages of a collaborative project with Jayne… trying to get my own thoughts down on paper… starting as I always do with words and thoughts, word play and association, trying to get my own take on what we might do before working out how we might combine our individual perspectives into some kind of coherent vision that still gives each of us voice. Needless to say, my own is gonna be a lot darker I’m certain… but it’s all provisional and even if I end up shifting into a whole different direction of how I see it I really enjoy this process… as with helping out Chloe on her project, and reminiscent of planning ikon gatherings, it’s all about letting words float about and ideas rise to the surface… watching as they shape and conversing with them in doodles and mind maps… what is all this mess here? How do I make sense of this, what are the questions needing answered?
I love the joining of the dots, flowing from word to word to word, sometimes smooth, sometimes leaping… a kind of map making… not just of a vision but of the self… linking the personal to the social, and trying to find the universals in between…

::

And something makes me want to link that thought with this from Dillard, although at present I can best think that’s got something to do with language…

“…somewhere around 11,000 yrs ago, some clever hunting human primates – who made stone spears, drew pictures, and talked – had another idea. they knocked ripe seeds from transplanted wild barley or einkorn wheat and stored the seeds dry at their campsite in the Zagros Mountains. Since eating ground seeds kept the families alive when hunting failed, they settled there, planted more seed, hunkered down to wait its sprouting, and, what with one thing and another, shucks, here we be, I at my laptop computer, you with a book in your hands. We are just like squirrels, really, or, well, more like gibbons, but we happen to use tools, speak, and write; we blundered into art and science. We are one of those animals. The ones whose neocortexes swelled, who just happen to write encyclopaedias and fly to the moon. Can anyone believe this?
Yes, because cultural evolution happens fast; it accelerates exponentially and, to put it less precisely, explodes. Biological evolution takes time, because it requires biological generations; the unit of reproduction is the mortal and replicating creature. Once the naked ape starts talking, however, “the unit of reproduction becomes” – in the words of anthropologist Gary Clevidence – “the mouth”. Information and complexity burgeon and replicate so fast that the printing press arrives as almost an afterthought of our 10 billion brain neurons and their 60 trillion connections. Positivist science can, theoretically, account for the whole human show, even our 5.9 billion unique shades of consciousness, and our love for one another and for books.
Science could, I say, if it possessed all the data, describe the purely physical workings that have enabled our species to build and fly jets, write poems, encode data on silicon, and photograph Jupiter. But science has other fish to fry. Science (like philosophy) has bypassed this vast and abyssal fish of consciousness and culture. The data are tighter in other areas. Still, let us grant that our human world is a quirk of materials. Let us ignore the staggering truth that you hold in your hands an object of culture, one of many your gaze meets all around you. If, then, the human layer in which we spend our lives is an epiphenomenon in nature’s mechanical doings, if science devotes scant attention to human culture, and if science has scrutinized human consciousness only recently and leaves other disciplines, if any, to study human thought – then science, which is, God knows, correct, nevertheless cannot address what interests us most: what are we doing here?”

- Annie Dillard, For The Timebeing, 1999, pp 93-95

::

Listening again for first time in a many a month to Denison Witmer’s album Are you a dreamer?, arguably my favourite album of last winter (but who’d want to argue about such a thing)… too cozy for warmer months… no less beautiful this year. If I found it hard not to weep every time I heard this last year, it is testament to the improvement in my broader emotional states, it now makes me smile wistfully. The magic that music does to us, speaking each passing year with evolving voice never ceases to amaze me.

Perhaps faithfulness rewards us with unfolding returns. At least, it feels like it ought to… maybe that’s why music feels like magic…

LB,x

let's just say it's the moon

or so says jayne...

well i guess my mood just didn't improve all that much, or at least if i woke up feeling like the weather, then, despite a delicious evening meal in the company of some lovely people who deserved better company than mine, i retire feeling downright low...
for the first time in a long time i feel myself withdrawing...pulling myself into a small space and shutting down...if i were to hide i don't know where i'd go...

may one wake and climb out the right side of the bed, or find the world magically transformed and all the questions will have found their answers and be at peace...
tomorrow i learn the haka. and i guess it's not everyday one gets to say that...

LB,x

all just a distraction...

raindrops keep falling on my head...

i miss the cottage on days like this, miss the everchanging views of wet greenness and earthy soil holding growing things and the movement of flying things... nature up so much closer and i guess 'natural', rather than rows of brick upon brick that don't need the drink and in drenchedness just inspire depressive claustrophobia...or perhaps it's just me, and not the weather, that's cold and heavy...

and just like the guy whose feet are too big for his bed...

still if i head out today, my feet shall at least be dry in my new 14 hole NPS stomper boots. whether i am channelling my inner butch or skinhead remains to be seen. regardless, flares and converse do not make for sog-free atire.

nothing seems to fit...

feel like i got out of the wrong side of bed this morning... irriatable, irked and impatient..."fecked off with everything and nothing" might be the way to describe it. my bed is by the wall, and with no option to reposition, i can only hope it rights itself soon... or i do...

those raindrops keep falling...

(later)
sitting now over a mochaccino or three, head in 'fonz with ::sun kil moon:: and ::tunng:: running from my laptop into my ears and on through my veins and restoring a sense of something like contentment... my iPod died but regardless, i've listened to very little of late... i've been feeling increasingly disconnected from music, maybe because these days i don't have the daily walk to and from work, and the absence of tunage kind of crept up on me...all i know is, i'm not happy about it... i used to listen to music from morning 'til night and these days my life feels drier for lack of a soundscape... life is a less sensory experience... it seemed that living with less music (at least through the 'fonz) might open me up to listening to people more, or seeing wonder in everyday experience of the cafe and street, but i am instead only made more aware of how much banal shite people are willing to spout (rather like this i guess)... perhaps for me attentiveness to the bustle of the cafe and street is better when it's an intentional attentive experience rather than the norm...there is an introvertedness to my personality that the privacy of the personal stereo system allows for...a room of my own i can carry with me...if there is a lesson it is perhaps, if it ain't broke don't fix it, regardless of what anyone says... me and my soundtrack work well together, i write more and, perhaps more importantly, relax more inside this iWomb...

they keep falling...

so, here's an excerpt from that waits interview in ::the word:: i keep revisiting, a source of inspiration,

mick brown: "there's a wondrful entry in jack kerouac's letters where... he's in a diner in Wyoming having breakfast and a cowboy walks in - the first kerouac's seen - and he describes it as if the very essence of life itself was gusting in the door. you seem to be very alive to those kind of moments, those epiphanies, in your songs."

Waits: "well, i think once you've experienced some of those moments you try to influence them. you're always waiting for them to happen, the way cats wait for things to move around the house, you sit and wait quietly, you know. you never know when they're going to happen, and you want to be ready. i think that's what people look for in songs. i write down song titles usually, and usually something that you're going thorugh emotionally will make a particular title leap out at you. this is what my wife says - there's something that you're already working on inside that this song will be the manifestation of. now you have a container. the first thing that anybody ever created was a container. someone made a bowl to hold the water. and then they made a song about the bowl that held the water. you know, people opnly travel really with their seeds and with their songs. in bosnia, they interviewed a lot of the refugees - they'd left with nothing and they asked them what they had, and they had seeds, in their pockets, from their gardens. and their songs. that was it. once you're nourished in that most fundamental way, everything else will follow."

...a tin can is a container...

and from julia cameron, who's vein of gold has been a constant insightful companion of late while i've been developing concepts for my submissions to the ikon art exhibition in the waterfront (feb 2007) and for a collaborative installation project jayne and i are discussing for later next year...

"here is another pernicious aspect of our mythology: you are not a "serious artist" unless you are perceived, recognised, acknowledged as a serious artist. this takes the power away from the artist and puts it in the eye of the beholder... the artist is reduced to a poseur instead of having the dignity of a self determined life. in other words, we are acting the role of an artist rather than inhabiting the identity of artist as it suits us."

i had copied this quote onto the front of my sketch&ideas book a few days ago and then twice yesterday i was asked by strangers whether i was an artist. while i hesitated and stumbled a little in my response, i could feel myself internally leaning into some kind of affirmative place... i'm gonna play with an easy-to-remember clarifiying and affirming response, but the more i think about this stuff and play with it, i more and more recognise that 'artist' or indeed 'writer' is used when what we mean is "professional artist/writer"... which when it comes down to it is not really very helpful... i don't want to create for money - by which i mean i don't want to create because the end point is earning money. i want to create as an end in itself, the process is the reward, the desire to creatively express is hugely defining of who i am, that radar as chris calls it listening and reading the world i find myself in, living through it and authentically voicing what i find and feel in it... i want to create for the love of it, because it feels like living, like right now as i babble away what i'm thinking and feeling i am fulfilled in the moment, i feel contentment in my body and peace of mind...that my life is so much more happier for creating things in word and image... we can call that what we like, i don't need a label, i'm just gonna get on with living and creating as i go and just making sure i build a lifestyle that leaves time and space for creativity of all kinds...'cause if nothing else it's good for my mental health...
i've been surprised by how unaffected i feel by hearing many positive responses to ::supended like scales::...or perhaps i mean how lightly i've been able to hold that... i don't think it's my discomfort at receiving praise causing avoidance...certainly it has given me confidence to do more work for a public setting, but almost paradoxically the encouragement makes me more enthusiastic to speak with my own voice rather than tailor it to what others want to hear...to keep creating for me... which has something to do with authenticity... i think...

being creatively productive has been getting a lot easier since i
1. stopped dreaming of being a 'creator' and just got on with creating,
2. not giving a shit whether it pays, and
3. started recognising myself as being inherently creative whether anyone cares or not... i guess i'm learning how not to ask permission...

so, in order to add to the ways in which i can express myself and also because learning is something we should never give up on, i've signed up for a course in photo-intaglio and got my name on a waiting list for a longer course in a wider range of printmaking techniques, and i am considering my living options so that they can include some kind of personal space devoted to creative playfulness, be that a studio or in a house...

i was really enlivened by the new realists exhibition at the tate liverpool when i stopped there on the divine comedy tour. i felt at home, uninhibited by the work. rather than dreaming of my having pieces alongside in some 'celebrated artist' kind of way, i just thought, i wouldn't feel embarrassed putting a scribble up on the wall beside these folks... they are people, saying something, and the only difference between them and anyone else is they have been recognised by people who run galleries and sell art as being worthy of display or purchase. perhaps i felt uninhibited because for the most part this is a style of art that is as much about message as it is about the ability to use a brush in a certain way. but all over the world folks are creating and no one ever notices them. it doesn't make them any less artistic or creative. if price or public recognition is the dividing line, then i really don't care... what matters is if you are living from the heart...

i'm floating away on a little wispy cloud of ulrich schnauss... that's enough incoherent rambling for now. gonna read me some more dillard... ::for the timebeing:: is awesome and i forgotten my copy contains scribbles in the margins from david dark...

outside it's still raining... and we shall know what we wish were present by the absense we feel...

LB,x

scraps

have had a busy few days, so the best i can manage right now is this tiny snippet from my head... i've two art projects in design stage so all my thoughts are spilling into my sketch book right now. details later.

::

Postscript from a railway carriage…

Listening to the wonderful tones of Ted Hughes reading from Crow, (Chris, you are gonna love this), as we rattle and roll towards the dirty auld town... grimace rhymes with face…

Any alteration from Hughes’ grammar is my own… I loved hearing this so much I had to transcribe it… darkly comic.


Apple Tragedy

So, on the seventh day the serpent rested.
God came up to him,
“I’ve invented a new game”, he said.
The serpent stared in surprise at this interloper
But God said, “You see this apple?
I squeeze it and look! Cider.”
The serpent had a good drink and curled up into a question mark.

Adam drank and said, “Be my God.”
Eve drank and opened her legs and called to the cockeyed serpent and gave him a wild time.
God ran and told Adam, who in drunken rage tried to hang himself in the orchard.
The serpent tried to explain, crying
“Stop!” but drink was splitting his syllable,
And Eve started screeching, “Rape, rape!” and stamping on his head.

Now whenever the snake appears she screeches,
“Here it comes again, help, oh help!”
Then Adam smashes a chair on its head,
And God says, “I am well pleased”.
And everything goes to hell.

::

On Sunday I picked up a copy of the word magazine pretty much solely on the basis of anton corbijn’s beautiful cover photo of tom waits.

The interview inside is no less beautiful. I’ve read and reread it. Truly inspiring in some deep gut level kinda way... more to come on that i'm sure...

but right now i'm off with keli to a print works open day and to get my hair cut,

LB,x