Nonsense & NF Simpson

Posted on February 14, 2012 by admin

To leap from Alfred Jarry straight through to NF Simpson in the late 50s is to leave a lot out in terms of nonsense theatre otherwise known as the theatre of the absurd and possibly other sub-categories. But when you’re writing you can jump around in time and so I do. Because in the late 60s Simpson was my introduction to that sort of thing. My brother was keen on drama and he had some of his plays which I read. Part of the powerful pull they had on me then is obviously to do with the fact that these plays had been a very strong influence on a lot of the popular innovative comedy of the mid to late 60s, in particular the work of Peter Cook and then later Monty Python.

Simpson claimed that he didn’t know much about the work of earlier dramatists such as Ionesco and I can believe him. He mentioned Lewis Carroll as more of an influence. The plays haven’t aged too well in that the humour now seems dated. They created an effect which was of the moment and somehow was an opening which allowed something new to emerge.

The usual premise of a Simpson play is to use a banal everyday setting, a suburban middle-class home or an office, and people these with unexceptional individuals whose dialogue is at times a series of inane non-sequiturs. In The Hole a man-hole on the edge of a street or pavement is used as a central point which draws a small crowd of onlookers. There is a solitary messianic character, The Visionary; 3 men whose dialogue is somewhat more rational and 2 housewives (Mrs Meso & Mrs Ecto) who are a bit of a Greek chorus though most of their exchanges are off the point, endlessly discussing their husbands’ whims. Eventually a workman emerges from the hole. He immediately disappears, his only words being,

Cables! Junction box! Electricity! You never had any of this ruddy caper back in the Ice Age

The fantastic imaginative arabesques of the 3 men are dashed against reality.

SOMA: And this word “junction box”. Does it mean anything? Or is it just a new name for something we’ve been looking at all along?

CERBERO: It does have a meaning – a very definite meaning. Though it doesn’t make a great deal of difference to what’s down there, whether you call it by that name or another one. We call it a junction box because that happens to be a useful and convenient term for it – but any other name would do almost equally well. We know quite a lot about it, too. We know what its function is and we know what would be the immediate and the long-term effects of removing it. We could fairly easily – if you particularly asked us to do so – find out who put the junction box here and when. We can tell at roughly what date the modifications incorporated in this type were adopted as standard, and we can tell you to what extent they represent an improvement on the old type.

At the centre of the play a creed is recited by the 3 men in unison. I think it fits well with some of the Nonsense excerpts I have included in earlier posts. See the links at the end for the details of these.

I believe in one aquarium which was and is and shall be; in which shall be comprehended the sprat and the Black Widow; in it the sole and the carp shall swim together, the swordtail and water-flea; with the gudgeon shall float the mackerel, with the roach the guppy; duckweed shall be there, and foaming moss; neither shall the water at seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit be at variance with the water at forty degrees Fahrenheit, or eschew it. And the freshwater shall be salt and the saltwater fresh, and no distinction shall be made between them, for all are of one aquarium and there is no other aquarium, but this.

Edward Lear
Nursery Rhymes
Lewis Carroll
Erich Kästner
Alfred Jarry
Edward Gorey

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Granite Mix 2

Posted on February 6, 2012 by admin

Well this mix has a bit of a harmonica theme for a good part of it. In my 1st Granite Mix I explained how the music was selected. It’s the same again but this time there was an edit – there were a couple of other tracks between the Captain Beefheart and the Howling Wolf, but I took them out as it seemed to be good to run those 2 together. The whole thing is I think just short of 40 minutes.

here’s the mix

and here’s a link so you can download the mp3

Granite Mix 1
Artist Title Album
Joanna McGregor Ravel: Pavanne Pour Une Infante Défunte Quiet Music
Roscoe Holcomb Fox Chase The High Lonesome Sound
Bob Dylan Walkin’ Down The Line Bootleg Series Vol 1-3
Captain Beefheart Gimme Dat Harp Boy Strictly Personal
Howling Wolf Riding In The Moonlight Unknown Album
Syd Barrett Opel Opel
The Fall Riddler! Bend Sinister
Charlie Haden & Hank Jones My Lord What A Mornin’ Steal Away
Method Man Redman Maaad Crew Blackout!
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Botánica Tomo II

Posted on January 25, 2012 by admin

This is the 2nd Chilean post in the micromuseum section. For the first one go here. A couple of weeks ago I included a drawing which pointed an accusatory finger towards this micromuseocosmic instance. That was here. The monkeys illustration was from a Chilean textbook from 1927 that my father had when he was at school there. It must have been shortly before he was sent to boarding school in England.

Here’s the front of one of the other books.

And now some illustrations from this book. Firstly this is what I take to be a baobab tree and I’m not even checking to find out whether I’m right or not. The drawing suggests to me a tree that reproduces by spreading itself out rather than dropping seeds. It’s a typical ploy by a lot of plants that come from a tropical latitude.

The 2nd illustration has something that is reminiscent of a painter I mentioned recently which is Magritte. The cabbage and roots suspended in the air has a somewhat surrealistic feel to it. It’s interesting that photomontage was a favourite device of many of that movement’s artists. Ernst in particular immediately springs to mind.

And here’s a rare colour picture. That must have been pretty exciting back in 1927.

Finally my pièce de résistance. This one would make a lovely tea towel or tray design, maybe even an apron. I intend to earn a fortune selling it via National Trust outlets.

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Wintersol

Posted on January 14, 2012 by admin

Here’s a bit more about Eric Thacker and Anthony Earnshaw’s under-appreciated Musrum books.

Unlike most love stories the lovers in Wintersol never really meet. If you can call them lovers. There are 2 protagonists, Christmas and Bella. They inhabit a series of interlocking spaces within the musroid world, i.e. the world devised in Musrum.

The musroid world is a headstrong replica of the world we know constructed on the principle that all conceivable and inconceivable things persist within reality, and that myth is the true history of this or any other world.

Christmas and Bella don’t need each other except as a reflection of themselves and their solitude is generally inevitable – intimacy is just a dream. For a short period they exchange letters which is the closest they come to the dream, but you can’t help feeling that anticipation is more quintessential than consummation.

‘Rotabella, my pretty silver wheel,’ wrote Christmas, ‘I want you to spin the fortunes of my journeys, and carry me hither and thither with the speed of starlight. There are so many places to go, so many sights to see!’

‘Warden of the Snow, Rubicotta,’ responded Bella, ‘I feel already the blizzard of your beard. Red-garbed, white-haired, wooly-mittened, jack-booted, sack-bearing, chimney-creeping, kindly burglar, you are my Garibaldi sprung from the grave.’

‘The laggard postman is no friend of lovers,’ wrote Christmas. ‘Enough of paltry scribblings! I shall dispatch myself, a living letter, for you to open and read. Be ready!’

‘Fly down, gaudy robin, and perch on my finger,’ implored Bella. ‘Sing me the thin song of winter. If you want me to believe in you, do not disappoint me or disregard my final request.’

Eventually Christmas descends the chimney, but the bed is empty, Bella plays a trick and disappears.

On one level the book is a joke which proposes an alternative origin to the Santa Claus tradition, but of course it is mainly a procession of surrealist nonsense with ingenious and skillful illustrations. The book was first published in 1971. Here is the frontispiece

here an excerpt from Christmas’s diary

and this one’s not for children of a nervous disposition

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Christmas 2011

Posted on January 3, 2012 by admin

It’s been a particularly dark, dismal and wet end of December start of new year, but I have managed to do a couple of things. Firstly here is a piece of music with words that I have called Pineapple Crumble. Not that I’ve eaten any pineapple crumble, but now I’m determined to make some sometime in 2012. The music part was recorded on Christmas Day and the words I used were a couple of things I wrote in August and September 2011. Here’s the text of the August one with some bespoke illustrations,

freestyle thursday 11th august 2011 00:56

here we are with this unrelated scion
tress dispossessed
umbilical
satirical
certain to be dropped
wherever cantilevered
and outmanouevred
treading in traction
for only a fraction
of the expenditure
we counted it earlier
then we spent it
frantically
hysterically
like monkeys up a tree

gibbering
deliberating
which is frustrating
when you’re delusioned
that’s an illusion
that implies wit
like a gong that’s hit

upstairs at night
to announce prayers
Dorothy L. Sayers
had it with Wimsey
that’s hardly flimsy
just points to pieces
therapeutic diseases
cured at Lourdes
by the people who toured
constructed pavilions
with mosaics of vermilion
if that’s not too flowery
like a bell chiming hourly
at the top there’s the steeple
inside all the people
circling surely
poisoned not purely
relaxed and tradition
subtle rendition
the ladder to tumble
the corner to crumble

Pineapple Crumble

And another thing I managed to do was to complete a music video to go with a version of my song Children of the Sea using footage taken by my friend Simon Williams.

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happy new year

Posted on January 2, 2012 by admin

I haven’t been involved with the Occupy movement although I’ve been an observer since it’s start in Bristol as I was working in the building in front of which the protest was held. I’m sympathetic as most thinking people are to the aims of the movement but there seemed to be something a bit half-baked about the protest. Ultimately it’s good that there are people prepared to get out there and propagate and defend their beliefs. Earlier this evening (30th December 2011 – in the dark) I managed to do my bit by contributing to a gathering where we got together by the side of the camp and sang a few songs. It was organised by my friend Jo Harris and was aimed principally to promote the ideas of the Positive Money organisation.

Personally I look to Chomsky to give me guidance in the sphere of global development. I believe that he is the godfather of all this Occupy-type stuff. For me he sits astride the 20th-21st century socio-political world as Marx did in the 19th century, but whereas Marx developed a political system which would replace capitalism, Chomsky has just given us a critique of the current global political situation, there is no alternative system presented. Perhaps this is the best way.

My problem is that I look at history to provide antecedents. There’s always been a lot of shit happening and I find it hard to believe that that’s going to stop being the case. The rest is messianism.

Anyway here are a few quotations from Chomsky from an interview by Corporate Watch from May 1998,

Computers were created at public expense and public initiative. In the 1950s when they were being developed, it was about 100% public expense. The same is true of the Internet. The ideas, the initiatives, the software, the hardware — these were created for about 30 years at public initiative and expense, and it’s just now being handed over to guys like Bill Gates.

…that’s the whole point of corporatization — to try to remove the public from making decisions over their own fate, to limit the public arena, to control opinion, to make sure that the fundamental decisions that determine how the world is going to be run — which includes production, commerce, distribution, thought, social policy, foreign policy, everything — are not in the hands of the public, but rather in the hands of highly concentrated private power.

If you go back to around 1970, international capital flows were about 90% related to the real economy, like trade and investment. By now, at most a few percent are related to the real economy. Most have to do with financial manipulations, speculations against currencies, things which are really destructive to the economy. And that is a change that wasn’t true, not only wasn’t true 100 years ago, it wasn’t true 40 years ago.

So the first thing that has to be done is to create for ourselves, for the population, systems of interchange, interaction, and so on. Like Corporate Watch, Public Citizen, other popular groupings, which provide to the public the kinds of information and understanding, that they won’t otherwise have. After that they have to struggle against it, in lots of ways which are open to them. It can be done right through pressure on Congress, or demonstrations, or creation of alternative institutions. And it should aim, in my opinion, not just at narrow questions, like preventing monopoly, but also at deeper questions, like why do private tyrannies have rights altogether?

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granite mix 1

Posted on December 20, 2011 by admin

A few years ago I put some mixes up on the web and each one took quite a lot of preparation. For a start the music was on vinyl and I had to digitise it. Then I researched each artist and wrote a little bit about them. And also scanned cover art and then loaded it all up and used html (nothing too complicated). Now I’ve worked out this easier way which even takes away the need for me to make any choices…or hardly any. I have this Brennan box that a friend gave me and I’ve loaded up a lot of music onto it. Like most things you can randomise it and it does a neat little segue between tracks. I know everyone does this sort of thing all the time anyway. Which means that I’m not exactly sure of the value of putting this up. In the end it’s like a radio show and I suppose those are still popular enough. I wanted to use some sort of name to associate with this process and hit on granite – not sure why exactly although if pressed I’m sure I could think of some reasons

Here’s the mix

And here’s the tracklist

Granite Mix 1
Artist Title Album
John Surman Druid’s Circle A Biography of the Rev Absalom Dawe
Jeru the Damaja Me or the Paper Wrath of the Math
Carla Bley End of Animals Escalator over the Hill
Wayne Shorter Night Dreamer Night Dreamer
Willie Walker Dupree Blues Ragtime Blues Guitar
Cannonball Adderley & Bill Evans Who Cares You Know What I Mean
The Cramps Love Me Off The Bone
Gang Starr Work Moment of Truth
Sheppard A Solis Ortus Cardine n/a (radio broadcast)
Kronos Quartet & Asha Boshle Piya Tu Ab To Aaja You’ve Stolen My Heart
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as regards tintin street

Posted on December 2, 2011 by admin

At last I have managed to finish the demo I started a while ago. It gives me a chance to put up a couple more bits of Hergé artwork in an unassuming manner. I can’t see the harm in it myself. I’ve called it RV Marche RG which is pronounced as if you were speaking French to give it an English quasi-phonetic spelling it would be ‘ervay marsh erjay’ or something like that but really you need to get that guttural French R to give it it’s most satisfying rendition. Really I know that properly my initials should be reversed and be ‘vayeur’ rather than ‘ervay’ but the thing is I’ve never reversed my initials – yeh sure I’ve reversed the letters of the name because that makes Trebor Yesav which could easily be a Georgian sculptor or a Macedonian boat-builder – but Georges Remi did reverse his initials which gave him his distinctive pen-name.

The song stems from a street near where I live which for some reason I call Tintin Street. Quite often when I’m coming home late at night I pause for a while on this street (which is quite a steep hill) and reflect. I’ve thought a lot about why I call it Tintin Street but I can’t quite pin it down. It was sort of an instinctive thing. I’ve looked through the various books trying to find some point of reference but with no success so far. Here follow some street and house images from the cartoons.

My Tintin Street is very different from the actual street that Tintin lived on. We just get glimpses of that. Here seen from a vantage point slightly higher than the 2nd floor window suspended in the air outside the building.

And here from the middle of the road outside. It’s quite a busy street in the middle of town. As you can see the glimpses of the street usually coincide with a dramatic incident – abduction in both these cases. Firstly Bunji Kuraki of the Yokohama police force and secondly Tintin himself.

So what is the reference point? The madeleine in the tisane? Is it the balconied window?

Or maybe just the shutters?

It could be the long, high concrete wall that I refer to in the 3rd verse of the song. Plain walls are popular with cartoonists for obvious reasons.

Or possibly it’s all a mistake and I was thinking of another famous Belgian.

[René Magritte L'Empire des Lumières (detail)]

Anyway here’s the track.

RV Marche RG

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december 3rd MMXIce

Posted on November 12, 2011 by admin

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What will be and what’s gone past

Posted on November 3, 2011 by admin

This is just an interim post to jot down a few things that may be coming and a few that may not. A few follow-ups and advertisements where the 3rd syllable sounds like eyes and is stressed accordingly.

There will be a Neureille gig at the Kingsdown Vaults in Bristol on Saturday 3rd December. Proposed line-up will be Paul Wigens on drums & percussion (small kit), Everton Hartley on bass guitar & guitar as well sometimes probably, Tom Ranby on whichever saxophone he fancies that night. I will be playing my Spanish guitar rather than my Strat. Laura Lambell might make it too to do some vocals. We will be playing songs from the 2 albums, disparue & amanogawa plus possibly doing some other things. And I hope to have a few guests to do some cameo appearances plus some sets. I will provide more details when I’ve worked that out. Unfortunately Ant Noel won’t be able to make it as he’s playing a solo gig that night.

But I will be doing a couple of things with Ant over the next couple of weeks – Sunday 13th November at the Somerset House in Clifton Village and Tuesday 22nd November at the Merchant’s Arms in Hotwells. I’m not sure exactly what sort of thing the session on the 13th will be, but I’ve done a couple of the Tuesday night sessions already with Ant and my contribution has been as a quartet with Everton and myself on guitar, Ant on mandoline and James Stallwood on clarinet as we did at the event I described in an earlier post. It’s a great line-up. We’ve only played 4 songs so far but we could easily do a 45 minute set at the drop of a hat because there’s a lot of freedom and improvisational possiblities there.

I’m a bit behind at posting things here, but I’m working on a demo of a new song which will make a nice post with some more artwork from The Adventures of Tintin. Too much day-work right now is slowing me down, but that is due to finish at the beginning of December. Other posts I have promised are

  • Wintersol – sequel to Musrum (another one for the Nonsense category)
  • Edward Gorey Part II (again Nonsense)

One that I promised which I decided not to do was on the wreck of the Medusa. I found that this had been covered pretty extensively in a work by Julian Barnes. There’s something a bit plagiaristic I find about that sort of thing. Borges was able to do it ok and Umberto Eco also does it in a way I find acceptable, though I must admit I can’t call myself a huge fan of either of those writers. In other words, I think covering the Medusa raft story is ok for a blog post but to me it shows a lack of inventiveness to rewrite the narrative in a novel, however nice a style you have. So sorry about that.

To conclude the Fool’s Gold saga I will be putting up the track that I recorded back in 1983 or so which uses random snippets from the text. This easily ties in again with Nonsense as does another post which I’ve been meaning to write based on the work of NF Simpson who died earlier this year.

I’ve mentioned Kafka in the last two posts and so I’ve just made that a run of 3, but at the moment I’m simultaneously re-reading The Complete Short Stories and also The Diaries. After that I’ll re-read the Walter Benjamin essays and then maybe write further on the writer who I feel in many ways made me write the way I do. All this takes time and creative energy so may not happen until next year.

On the micromuseum front I should like to do another postage stamp set + I took some photos of some strange Chilean artefacts which need to be manipulated and I also need to think what possibly I can write about them, for they are mysterious and very difficult to research. Other micromuseum things I planned were a post on Alfred Wainwright’s book, Fellwanderer, some of John S Goodall’s illustrated small books and probably some other things, but now it is late – gone 3am and I must be up soon after 7.

I couldn’t be bothered to put the usual links I put in, in this post. Occasional sloppiness can only lead to perpetual sloppiness, but the excuses are there.

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