Poetry and online publishing? How predictable. Also lots of the usual old culture stuff, you know, art, architecture, film, lots of film, even TV on a good day, ideas (remember them?. Various places. London's good, as is the South-West and some bits of the Southlands. Italy, Spain, France etc. China, Singapore, Malaysia.
Oh - never football under interests.
Music
Richard Strauss, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Tommaso Albinoni, Thomas Tallis, Gustav Mahler - they're all good
PJ Harvey, Einstürzende Neubauten, Dave Houssart, In the Nursery, Spares, Andrew King, Sol Invictus, Patti Smith, Throbbing Gristle, Sieben, Karen Johnson, Nick Cave, Shirley Collins - they're all good too
Captain Beefheart, Blondie, Velvet Undergound, Dylan, Incredible String Band, and more, all were good
Movies
so many - virtually any (except Absolute Beginners and Forrest Gump) - but if you want titles, some important films to me are The Big Sleep, Battleship Potemkin, Desperately Seeking Susan, Delicatessen, Drowning by Numbers, Serenity, Jubilee, Farewell, My Lovely, Aliens, Bladerunner, Touch of Evil, My Beautiful Laundrette, Spirited Away, Metropolis, Brief Encounter, Fellini Satyricon
Television
After a little while, it all cloys nowadays. Quatermass and the Pit, Steptoe and Son, The Singing Detective - now they have never cloyed. Alright - I do always watch Holby City. And Raising the Dead. Yes, OK, shows with grumpy and incompetent middle-aged blokes who somehow win through, I could relate to those on an obvious fantasy level.
Books
JH Prynne, Tom Raworth, John James, Andrew Crozier, Anthony Barnett, Peter Riley, Lee Harwood, Denise Riley, they're a good start
Ken Macleod, M John Harrison, China Miéville all fill me with acute pleasure on reading & rereading
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The first three of these mp3s are from the wonderful Archive of the Now site run by Queen Mary and Brunel, where I did a reading for Andrea Brady a couple of years ago. The other three tracks are from when I was performing as part of the Playgound in the mid 1980s with Jon Slater and Dave Houssart. More material is on Great Works.
GIGS
Thursday, September 3 Crossing the Line: The Leather Exchange, 15 Leathermarket Street, London Bridge, SE1 3HN; 7.30 pm; £5 or £3
Tuesday, October 6 Openned night: Benefit Gig For Lajee Center, West Bank, Palestine: at The Foundry, 84-86 Great Eastern Street, Shoreditch, EC2A 3JL; 19:15–22:15; free; but collection for the centre & booksale to raise money; Facebook Group
DIVERSE DEEDS
I organise a poetry and music reading/performance series:
Diverse Deeds explores innovative poetry and music in performance, roughly monthly at Café Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London E8 3DL
Doors open at 7.30; start at 8.00; end by 10.00; £6 entry (or £4 for students, claimants or pensioners)
Thursday, Sep 24: Sean Bonney + Grapefruits + John James
Diverse Deeds is a new series of poetry in music events, each featuring two or three poets and a musician or two. The emphasis is on contemporary innovative poetry and music at least inflected by improvisation. Diverse Deeds succeeds last year’s successful afternoon Sundays at the Oto events, but now with an evening scheduling. No more cake for tea, unfortunately, but there will be information available beforehand and on the night on all the performers.
PUBLICATIONS
The Bishops Stortford Variations (Great Works Editions, 1976)
What Was Shown (Ferry Press, 1980)
Some Action Upon The World (Grosseteste, 1982)
contributor to ed. Andrew Crozier & Tim Longville, A Various Art (Carcanet, 1987)
Are We Not Drawn ... takes off from a palindrome quoted in Anne Michael’s novel, Fugitive Pieces: "Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?" Drawn onward; but trapped in repetition and mirroring. The mirrors are now fractured: each line breaks under the strain, as voices and images pour in. Verbal repetitions, starting with the words of the palindrome, give some sorts of paths through, continually evolving and shifting. A work of naïve realism, then, capable of recording how gardenias, Inca mummies and the iron mines of West Somerset determine our days. Just listen to what you are being told ..."
There are also TV crime drama (CSI or Raising the Dead - which do you prefer?), the roads into Essex, our catastrophic environmental degradation, memories of poems about Ed Dorn, old hymns, seaside trolleybuses along The Esplanade, and whatever else I was told to write. And another cover with a photo of Minehead Beach (though it's no more about there than here).
£8.95! A mere snip for a 100 poem sequence. ISBN 9781848610248. Ideal holiday reading.
The replacement for Sundays at the Oto is now set up for the first event (Sean Bonney, Grapefruits and John James), on September 24th at Cafe Oto. Full details on its MySpace Page.
Whoever you are: in the evening step out of your room, where you know everything; yours is the last house before the far off: whoever you are. With your eyes, which in their weariness barely free from themselves from worn-out threshold, you lift very slowly one black tree and place it against the sky: slender, alone. And you have made the world. And it is huge and like a word which grows ripe in silence. And as your will seizes on its meaning, tenderly your eyes let it go…
I cannot thank you enough for your kind support and friendship! Welcome to
our ever growing family of friends. I'm really happy you have decided to
become friends of the Wake Up (to child abuse) MySpace Music page. Just by
adding us to your friends you have already demonstrated that you have a good
heart and are willing to take a step towards ending the hidden suffering of
so many.
We also dare to hope you will be able to persuade some of your other MySpace
friends to join our just fight against child abuse by adding us to their
friends too. The larger our family of friends becomes, the more people we
will be able to reach and educate about this terrible ‘disease’ sweeping
across the world which blights the lives of more children than you may
imagine. Please take a moment to read some of the statistics on child abuse
highlighted on our profile and within our blogs. I am sure you will be just
as shocked and appalled as we are when you find out the full extent of this
scourge.
The innocent children suffering such terrible abuse need all the help they
can get. Increased awareness of this foul concealed crime will help to
prevent more children living through the agonising torment which I was
forced to experience.
I hope you have a great day and look forward to hearing from you soon with
your views and comments on this important issue,
Thanks for the add and hope to meet you soon at the club with Mr.Houssart. Oh, and check out Dave's new song on the 'Ocean Of Tunes' player-'Coffee Bitch', that's the song by the way-not you!
“poetry and music with the post-avant crowd for your Sunday afternoon pleasure”
Third Sunday of the month, 3-5 pm, Café Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London E8 3DL £4 entry.
February 15: Sarah Jacobs with Imogen Smith & Alex Walker + Richard Makin (art & language) + Dawn Scarfe & Mel Gough (music)
Art, language & music coming together. Sarah Jacobs is a sculptor making objects, performance, installation, books on paper, and books in electronic form. Her electronic piece Deciphering Human Chromosome 16: We Report Here uses text in a visual way to document the ethical, economic, political and philosophical polemics associated with mapping the human genome, and their changes through time. Richard Makin is a writer of fiction and poetry and a visual artist. Experience his language as a complex and haunting landscape to drift across. <a href="http://www. dawnscarfe. co. uk/videos. html”>Carillon</a> is an experimental sound performance by artists Dawn Scarfe and Mel Gough. Guitars are tuned to resonant nodes in cymbals to produce a rich bell-like sound. The aim is to investigate accents and textures within the spectrum of resonant sound in immersive and meditative live exploration. Expect from this afternoon completely new stances on language, music and performance!
March 15: Paul Taylor's Trombone Poetry (music + words) + Uru-Ana (music + words) + Mike Weller (words +)
April 19: Abi Oborne + Holly Pester + James Wilkes (words+)
“poetry and music with the post-avant crowd for your Sunday afternoon pleasure”
Third Sunday of the month, 3-5 pm, Café Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London E8 3DL £4 entry.
January 18: Sue Ferrar, Sylvia Hallett & Stuart Jones (music) + Frances Presley + Gavin Selerie (poetry)
Sylvia Hallett, Sue Ferrar & Stuart Jones will provide a complex & skilled blend of improved musics, while Frances Presley (most recent book the wide-ranging, innovative and well-grounded Myne — New and Selected Poems & Prose 1975–2006 (Shearsman, 2006) + Gavin Selerie (most recent book: the erudite, gorgeous and inventive Lefanu's Ghost (Five Seasons Press, 2006) will read, separately, together, and with the music — just as it should be, yes?
February 15: Sarah Jacobs + Richard Makin (art & language) + Dawn Scarfe & Mel Gough (music)
March 15: Uru-Ana (music & words) + Mike Weller (words +)
April 19: Abi Oborne + Holly Pester + James Wilkes (words +)
I really enjoyed performing at the Oto, thank you for the invitation, it was a great night, fantastic venue, and a pleasure to listen to the other acts, Hannah
“poetry and music with the post-avant crowd for your Sunday afternoon pleasure”
Third Sunday of the month, 3-5 pm, Café Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London E8 3DL £4 entry.
November 16: Tom Lowenstein + Roshi Nasehi + Hannah Silva
Tom Lowenstein’s Ancestors and Species (Shearsman, 2005) brings back the voice of the Inuit, with accuracy, wit, wisdom & depth; Roshi Nasehi is an “exponent of "Stunningly beautiful Welsh-Iranian torch song electronica" sez Mixmag; and Hannah Silva? – "Her physical performances, fast-talking delivery and innovative use of cut-up text make her one of the most ambitious and entertaining poets in the country" sez The Times
December 21: Frances Kruk + Jow Lindsay + Jonathan Styles (music)
January 18: Sue Farrar (music) + Frances Presley + Gavin Selerie
February 15: Sarah Jacobs + Richard Makin + Dawn Scarfe
“poetry and music with the post-avant crowd for your Sunday afternoon pleasure”
Third Sunday of the month, 3-5 pm, Café Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London E8 3DL £4 entry.
October 19: Keith Jebb + The Mind Shop (music: Armorel Weston, John Gibbens and David Miller) + Wanda Phipps + Alyson Torns
Keith Jebb’s Hide White Space (Kater Murr’s Press, 2006) runs it all together,
sort of digests it & throws it in our faces; The Mind Shop sing and play pure poetry; Wanda Phipps out of Brooklyn, NY, sings with her Band and in her poetry; Alyson Torn’sFrom the Lost Property Office: a quartet for Pessoa (Hearing Eye, 2006) plays a
delicate game, but sets out to win
November 16: Tom Lowenstein + Roshi Nasehi (music) + Hannah Silva
December 21: Frances Kruk + Jow Lindsay + Jonathan Styles (music)
January 18: Sue Farrar (music) + Frances Presley + Gavin Selerie
“poetry and music with the post-avant crowd for your Sunday afternoon pleasure”
Third Sunday of the month, 3-5 pm, Café Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London E8 3DL £4 entry.
Sep 21: Tim Atkins + Isnaj Dui + Sophie Robinson
Tim Atkins’ Horace (O Books, 2007) gives the definitive, delightful & dangerous version for our days; Isnaj Dui’s electroacouistic blends & improvisations are both lush and dark; Sophie Robinson’s Killin’ Kittenish (yt communications, 2006) frolics, frightens & fiercely fantasises
October 19: Keith Jebb + The Mind Shop (music: Armorel Weston, John Gibbens and David Miller) + Alyson Torns
November 16: Tom Lowenstein + Hannah Silva + music tba
December 21: Frances Kruk + Jow Lindsay + Jonathan Styles (music)
..
