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Ska-Kestra 2012

May 24, 2012 //
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Simon says ‘Breathe in for 5, breathe out for 5’. I do what Simon says. Really nervous: very dodgy stomach. The thing about being a non-reading guitarist (the dots I can’t join up) is that I have to remember – how many verses/choruses? is the form under solos ABA or AB? or do we just go around the 1-6-2-5 progression, and how many times? etc, instead of reading the arrangement from the score, like the horn section (13 of them) do, from left to right. If I or the other rhythm players get it wrong, we could be on collision course. The awful responsibility.

It gets better every year, though. This time it’s really tight and punchy, and though a smaller audience (Chelsea v Bayern Munich: there is no life-form visible on Brighton’s streets), there’s a great atmosphere, and DJ Amma’s got them in the mood with her classic ska selection. Concorde2 has a big high stage that’s become crowded with 19 of us. At and over my feet there’s a tangle of cables, a music stand with my crude charts, spare guitar – yes, I break strings – monitor, and two guitar amplifiers pointing directly  at me.

Once you’re on stage, and playing, the nerves are gone, and the trick is to get the right balance between concentration, performance, attention and sheer pleasurable excitement. I lurch between these – mostly veering towards the latter. Our guest singer, Matty Eeles, steps up and delivers a passionate, belting Diamonds Are Forever over the big horn arrangement, and then we rip into the James Bond Theme at a fast skank.

At 10pm (we’re the early shift) we’re finishing with our big brassy Walk Don’t Run, and the Concorde man in the battered cowboy hat at the back is making evil throat-cutting gestures, and when we finish, the crowd roar and immediately start chanting for more. I look round: the throat-cutting has become more of a sawing-head-off motion, though the crowd can’t see. They just want more…

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Social Experiment

May 17, 2012 //
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Just off Pusher Street, at a table outside the whole food café, the plump girl is looking lost, as her cool slim friend is talking speedily, spliff in hand. I can remember that feeling, stoned in the open air in the afternoon. I could walk over to one of the hash-shops and buy a perfectly-rolled joint, but it’s been a long long while, and I can’t find any inclination. It makes me feel sad just to watch…

And, sadly, this is the received story about Christiania: you can sell, buy and consume marijuana here – not legally, but without being arrested. (I’m guilty of promoting this image, too: look how I started this piece). Christiania was (is) a brave experiment in alternative living. It’s a 32-year experiment, a ‘self governmental green Freetown’, in the former military barracks and parade ground in Copenhagen’s Christianshavn district. It covers 85 acres and has almost a thousand inhabitants. And a million visitors a year.

Since local people knocked down the fence in 1969 to get access to the abandoned space, people have made their homes here, planted gardens and playgrounds, governed themselves, represented themselves on the City Council, and fought off many attacks, often brutal, by the police and government. In 1972 they came to an agreement with the Ministry of Defence to use the area, and it was recognised politically as a ‘social experiment’.

There are trees and benches carved out of logs, meeting places, cafés selling doner kebabs, burgers, organic food, good espresso; the Christiania shop selling certificates of shares in the place, as well as T-shirts, hoodies etc. In the information hall, there’s a notice of Christiania’s Common Law: No weapons, no cars, no hard drugs, no violence, no bikers’ colours, no bulletproof clothing…

Residents on cycles with big boxes on the front weave in and out of the tourists, going about their lives; it must be like being a living exhibit. At our table are four older tourists (all right – my age) wearing expensive outdoor clothes caps and shades, and looking around them. Just like me.

‘But the dream of a life lived in freedom and the idea of a city ruled by its inhabitants continues.’

http://www.christiania.org/modules.php?name=Side&navn=linkeng

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Dansk Design

May 17, 2012 //
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Over lunch of schnaps, herring, paté and beer, Karen tells Gill about her childhood. Gill’s, that is. Karen was the au pair for her family 50 years ago, and has many stories to tell about Life with the Lipsons, most of them new to Gill. Karen met Peter, her husband, in London then. He was a Danish cabinet-maker working over here, and they’ve been together ever since. Guests at their home near Faaborg, south-west Fyn, we are treated handsomely, shown the countryside and town, and plied with exquisite food and drink. And Gill’s early life.

After cabinet-making, Peter became a designer and architect, and inventor. In his studio and workshop he shows us some of his ideas and products: a hair-treatment hood (hundreds of them, boxed and ready to go); a vacuum-pillow for radiology treatment; a wood-and-magnet, er, thing, that rolls around inside cows’ stomachs and collects all the bits of metal that they swallow with their grass; a simple sprung clip that stops your walking stick from sliding over onto the floor; a calf-feeding tube, a cat-pill-squirter, a pig-inseminator….

But his invention that even I (no great animal-lover) know already – though, sorry, it still makes me laugh – is the lampshade pet-collar, that stops animals from licking biting chewing fiddling with their dressings. Cats, dogs, rabbits, budgies the world over wear them (not fish or snakes though. But I like the idea of, say, a rhinoceros wearing one). Without a hang-dog face looking piteously out, I take this design seriously…

In Copenhagen I’m in the Design Centre, in the exhibition Hello Materials. There’s an alternative plastic made from fish-scales, artificial bone-growth material, floor-coverings made from recycled trainers, paint that lights up on your skin, soft stuff that goes hard on impact… exciting, cutting-edge, sustainable materials from the world’s scientists, inventors and designers.

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David Hockney

April 19, 2012 //
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In gold lamé jacket and matching shopping bag, bleached hair above black owl glasses, David Hockney strode across the page of The Sunday Times Colour Supplement, 1962. How cool!  An explosion of colour to bring the 50’s to an end. A flamboyant, cheeky enfant terrible from the Royal College: an inspiration to a 15-year-old arty kid. Suddenly art was about personality, even showmanship, as well as the stuff on the canvas. But that stuff on the canvas was wonderful – a mixture of private desires writ large in big expressionistic brushstrokes, lettering and jokes, wry post-modern comments on the nature of painterly illusion. I loved the messy early paintings. And then I loved the tight flat acrylics from California, and especially his crayon drawings: I bought Caran D’Ache Prismalo crayons, and Schoellershammer paper.

There are many reasons why the English love David Hockney. His paintings are (generally) representational, colourful, and easy to understand. For all his years in California, he’s still got his Yorkshire accent, and he speaks engagingly, fluently, down-to-earth. And he projects his enthusiasm, for looking, for experimentation, for the world around him.

‘David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture’ at the Royal Academy, fifty years on. It’s quite overwhelming, the sheer scale of his exhibition, filling these huge galleries, apart from the massive size of the paintings. His output is astonishing. You might say it’s about quantity, but the impact of the colour is thrilling. Vast canvases of the landscape of the Yorkshire Wolds – brilliant purples pinks bright greens – you get a sense of his joy in seeing and translating his vision. In the largest gallery there are 51 iPad drawings, drawn in the landscape, and they’re blown-up to about 7 feet high. It’s a joyful exhibition.

It’s an early spring day – blue sky, unseasonably warm, and Gill and I are following a walk from a laminated A5 sheet’s instructions, as in, ‘turn left along the edge of the field until you come to a stile…’. We started in Laughton, going north then round to the west and back down across the main road, towards the Laughton tower. In the bright sunlight there are the first traces of growth on the trees, and strong shadows, and it’s a Hockney landscape…

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Candoco: This is it

April 5, 2012 //
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Five Stratocasters on stage playing themselves. Mirjam has come on and turned up the volume knob on the Strat lying on its back: the low hum from the amp beside it sounds throughout the whole piece. But the others have a 12″ record mounted on the front of each, and as it revolves, it brushes a tremolo-drenched chord from the strings. She gyrates very slowly, leaning back to the floor, with incredible control. A tap-dancer sets up a slow rhythm – other dancers join the rhythm, and it builds, one of them crunching out an edgy riff on the guitar…

This is a performance by Candoco, the company that includes so-called ‘disabled’ dancers among its members. But that word really doesn’t apply here: the power, control, grace and beauty of their movements make it meaningless. A solo piece: Vicky comes on, in silence. She’s wearing an extraordinary outfit – as unlike contemporary dance as you can imagine. It’s a burlesque version of Wonderwoman, black and rhinestoned bikini, knee-high boots, headress with huge blonde hair spilling out. She approaches the audience, smiling, almost offering herself, this is me, hello, yes – me. Sort of sexy, but self-mocking, with each move turning to the audience: ‘Well?’ Funny too. Then suddenly there’s dry ice and a pounding house/disco track kicks in and she’s singing, and dancing: ‘This Is It!’

I’m on the huge Dome stage the next day, with two of their dancers and the rest of 3Score Dance. Mirjam takes us through Qi Gung exercises, and then she and Dan get us to walk the space, claiming it, then walk at half the speed, then half again, till we’re barely moving, (trying not to fall over). We’re tightly knotted together, echoing the shapes of each other’s bodies, still slow. Intensely physical and extraordinarily liberating.

This is it!

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Sketchbooks: Love ’em! Hate ’em!

March 29, 2012 //
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If you’re a ‘visual artist’, the received wisdom is that you should ‘keep’ a sketchbook (that’s what they say). Not just keep – use. And that’s where the hating starts. You hate the purveyors of that wisdom, and you hate yourself. It’s the guilt: you’ve bought an expensive sketchbook (that you loved when you saw it in the art shop) and you can’t wait to use it. Except that it’s too gorgeous to use: the white textured weave of the Moleskine is too intimidating – its pristine surface has a force field that repels all but the most confident user (and you can’t easily tear pages out). And so you keep it… ‘Can’t wait to use that Moleskine I bought!’ In the meantime, you’re keeping a sketchbook, and not ‘keeping’ a sketchbook.

So – buy cheap sketchbooks, and be uninhibited about what you put in them. Because a sketchbook is an essential tool: it’s a resource, and if it’s used regularly, you’re putting down your reactions to your surroundings, your life experiences, your ideas, to draw on, in both ways. It’s a great way of filling boring situations. It makes you really observe your surroundings, and it is its own moment. And, as the received wisdom goes, it’s a primary resource, and what you do in it sometimes transcends the more finished piece. And if you can get over the fear of an expensive surface, it’s a sensual joy to drag your pen pencil brush across that ridged thick white page.

Look, this is just me working out some issue here. Don’t let me make you feel guilty.

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All Saints

March 23, 2012 //
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The cold of the grave creeping into my buttocks, a pigeon calling, a blackbird singing: I’m in the shade of a solid dark yew in the All Saints churchyard, drawing the sunlit gravestones in front of me. Many of the inscriptions have disappeared, they’re so old, and they’ve become an installation that is more sculptural than commemorative. That’s appropriate, too: the church of All Saints (first mentioned in 1148) has been an arts centre since 1980. And I declare an interest: over the years I’ve played in bands on this stage, had a birthday party here, helped set up the Lewes Junior Film Club adventures here, watched films from its utilitarian seats, drawn it, photographed it, and swept up in it many many times. I love the place.

Inside it’s plain, except for the ornate memorials to the benefactors of the Parish, the great and the good of their times. Iohn and Iane (where I=J) Stansfield – ‘of the Cliffe nere Lewis’ – face each other, kneeling, and separated by their plaque; painted face cracked and dark with age, Iane regards her husband suspiciously, eyebrows raised over divergent eyes. He’s a Gent., though, who ‘hopefvlly ended his mortall life’ in 1626. Iane ‘his deere wife’ died 24 years later.

The sound of the organ drifts through the empty place – above the stage, in an orange glow, a bowed figure playing is half obscured by the deep dark drapes. In the back hall, the mirrors reflect the sinister looping trapeze ropes hoisted up into the high ceiling.

In All Saints there’s salsa, can-can, ska, capoeira, film, drumming, the Oyster café, blues, comedy courses, zumba, art workshops, a toy library, theatre, Nature’s Rhythms… Iohn and Iane had no idea that the All Saints church would become such a lively and creative place. And ‘hopefvlly’ – that’s how we should live.

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Brighton Museum

March 15, 2012 //
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Brighton in the sunshine! Glare on the dome of the Dome, and a huge snaking purple shadow of a tree fanning across the paths and grass of the Pavilion Gardens. There’s the hypnotic pattern of the mbira played by the Zimbabwean busker, his back to the Pavilion fence. I’ve been watching the BHWAC flash-mob’s reading of a Maya Angelou poem outside the Library to mark International Women’s Day, and now I’m heading for a favourite place.

I love the main hall of Brighton Museum, the 20th-Century gallery. Through the ogee-shaped entrance, to your right there’s the display of chairs, curves in plywood, metal, cardboard – extraordinary radical designs, then a huge A-rack of classic designs – leather, steel, bright orange. On the left there’s the ‘baseball-glove’ chair in brown leather, and, of course, Salvador Dali’s ‘Mae West’s Lips’ sofa in red velvet. Henri Navarre’s translucent bust of Beethoven from 1930, its gold plinth atop a Lalique glass and metal table, is bright against a dark lacquered screen. Further down, two naked men eye each other in David Paynter’s L’Après-Midi. It’s the sexiest image in the gallery – with the possible exception of Dali’s sofa.

The ‘Oriental’ style building, beautiful art, craft and design objects everywhere, the Mods&Rockers display, ancient Egypt, the Dirty Weekend – and coffee and cake. Excellent.

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The Old Rectory

March 8, 2012 //
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A dark canopy above me spider-like: it’ s the first time I’ve slept in a four-poster bed. It’s an Indian four-poster: ruched fabric with a pattern of elephant and rider, carved headboard, and little elephant tables round the huge room. Through the tall windows the lawns spread around, and below is the curved glass canopy stretching the depth of the house. The Old Rectory in Dorset, built in 1730, with the wings added in 1814, was reputed to be the largest and one of the most beautiful rectories in England.

This is a Country House Weekend (but without servants – it’s all upstairs). An elegant wooden staircase spirals up the middle of the house, and the landings lead off to rooms beyond rooms – eleven bedrooms, bathrooms with roll-top baths (and all modern conveniences). In the 80’s – 1980’s – it was run by its owner as a small art school and an artists’ and writers’ retreat, and there are paintings and scuptures everywhere.

The house is a real character: exquisite and rather precious on the website, it feels lived in, and comfortable. Through the front door, through another door, now, left/right? past the Elizabeth Frink print, the waist-high metal jar, a limbless plaster torso, left into the huge living room with a grand piano, big fireplace: it’s an achievement to have found this room. Friends arriving late wouldn’t know the house was inhabited save for the piles of boots in the hall.

The treasure hunt: there’s scurrying up and down the stairs, people bumping into each other, or trailing through the rooms, lost and suspicious. As the organiser, I’m enjoying watching, and I think I’m pretty smart with my clues. Not that smart, though: it’s won by a team who jumped ten clues and found the treasure – a golden box of Bonne Bouche truffles – nestling on the bottom A strings of the piano (clue: ‘How Grand A Bottom Sounds!’) by chance.

After a hugely muddy walk to the sea, I lie in the big bath on the top floor: light off, I watch the silhouette of Colmers Hill’s pines against the darkening sky. I’m sure Thomas Hardy did, too.

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New Eyes

February 28, 2012 //
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Andy Warhol looks a scream, hanging on the wall – six images of him being ‘strangled’. It’s his last day at the De La Warr Pavilion. We’ve seen these screenprints so many times: Mao, Marilyn, Andy… and we know the iconography. Warhol images: postcards, printed, cheap, disposable, ubiquitous. But the originals are powerful objects. The surfaces are real: luscious thick layers of ink on impasto-acrylic’d paper, big brushstrokes, throwaway squiggles. 10 Mao’s in different colourways – the murderous dictator benign and funny in rich unlikely colours. A gorgeous wall of electric chair prints: image of horror, beautiful colour.

Towner Gallery: In the middle of the huge room, there is a house. A full-size trapper’s cabin, come in from the hostile snowy landscape. Its bleached wood is almost colourless, but it’s actually not wood at all: it’s paper, photocopies tiled together over a hardboard frame – trompe-l’oeil from a few feet away. I had to feel it to find out. Inside (of course) there’s a rowing boat, and you get in, start rowing, across the lake on the big screen in front of you. As you pull on the oars, you are actually rowing the landscape around you, monochrome and bleak, sharp black fir trees – the wintry Canadian Rockies, uninhabited, menacing. You laugh, or say something to those waiting their turn. But if you were alone in here…

On the way home, a huge sun shines through low soft clouds, throwing the Downs into layers of cut-out blue.

‘The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.’ (Proust)

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