Theatre, art, poetry, music, London, the weather, airports, sudden fury, different music, still not cutting down on sugary snacks, film, horses, people doing sin, incidents, refractions, the entire dark dream outside.
...the godlike genius of Malcolm Phillips, who became the much-adored photographer-in-residence for the LEAN UPSTREAM season. Now that the season's over, there's no better way to mark its having happened in these pages than to show you a small selection of Malcolm's documentary images; there are more over at his Flickr photostream, alongside lots of other quite extraordinary sets and singletons. Not only is he doing an incredibly valuable job in documenting much that's happening on the poetry scene at present, but he's wildly good at buildings and (what sometimes get called) non-spaces too. Very unusual for one photographer to be as good with architecture as they are with people, I think (though I'm sure you can think of exceptions), but Malcs has a remarkable gift for bouncing off of each other an astute and imaginative analytical eye and a quick and generous wit -- qualities which have also made him a hugely valuable poetry critic, and a more than decent poet himself. (Though we'd like to see more of this last, please.) Fascinating to see how a compositional intelligence expresses itself in supposedly different modes -- the visual and the literary -- to quite similar effect. At any rate, in showing these few examples from his brilliantly sensitive and wonderfully unobtrusive work near me over the past few weeks, I can do no more than express my deepest gratitude to Malcolm for the kindness of his attention and the scrupulousness of his company.
A warm-up performance of Stripsody for promotional purposes
Basinski man-band: performing The Germ of Creativity with Lawrence Upton, Keston Sutherland, Jonny Liron
Schwitters's Ursonate
History of Airports book launch at STK: Rajni Shah, a picture of serendipity
Finlay Robertson's shoes
Everything but the shoes of Tom Lyall
CG as own granny; Harry Gilonis
STK landing strip
LEAN UPSTREAM is now over -- in fact already almost a week has gone by since the last of the events. I had good fun at the Artsadmin Weekender workshop: some really terrific people in the room, and exciting to have a group that was so diverse in its interests and various in its voices, and yet so ready to meet each other and work together; particularly useful to have people in the room who were quite newly arriving at performance from a visual arts background. Nice to see a couple of old Devoted & Disgruntled acquaintances too, with next January's event now booking. (Hope to see you all there, Thompsonistas. This year's was amazingly enjoyable and productive, and I can't wait for the next one.)
And then last Sunday's book launch was a great night, thanks principally to the miraculously large crowd who turned out on a damp and freezing evening, and to Greg McLaren at Stoke Newington International Airport, the warmth of whose hospitality was very nearly enough to stave off the chills. It was a long night -- so many of my old cohorts kindly made themselves available to read (all of them pretty brilliantly, I thought) that we got through pretty much half the book! But it felt, quite surprisingly -- HOA being a self-published enterprise full of shreds and patches -- as if something substantial had happened, and not only that but that it was worth celebrating. So I was very touched and very glad of all the circumstances that gradually shunted the launch event down the month's schedule so that it ended up being the last thing in the season. It couldn't have finished more delightfully. Thanks so much to everyone who came -- those who read, those who listened, and (with special brownie points) those who bought the book. (Check the sidebar if you want to get your copy. They're running out fast and I'm not too certain that I'll get any more done, unless the demand is obviously there. -- Btw, if you're reading this having ordered a copy by Paypal, I promise it's coming -- they should go in the mail early this week.)
This last week has been spent in an R&D workshop for Headlong -- I don't think I'll say any more about the project now, except that the week was, I thought, really exciting and encouraging: particularly the final afternoon, on which everything came together in a basically improvised script-in-hand production of the piece in toto, running three hours without a break, in which the acting company's creativity and acuity didn't falter once. I sort of wish it had had an audience: aspects of it were, I thought, exemplary -- the kind of thing one struggles to describe when asked about one's "vision". We were all pretty whacked by the end -- nice to have that feeling of hard work having added up to an extraordinary event, and a well-earned weekend waiting for us. I can't think of a room I've enjoyed being in more; thanks, should they see this, to Ben Power and Wendy Hubbard, and to all the actors, who without exception were beautiful to work with, and created together a really rare ambience. Remarkable stuff.
The rest of the year seems to have little in it beyond heavy blog obligations -- not least the Furtive 50. The 259 long-listed albums that I mentioned in my post of September 25th have now more than doubled in number to 559, what with the end of year effort to hoover up all the significant things I may have missed: and so the task ahead is more daunting than ever. I'm not sure that acquiring 559 new albums in a year is entirely what people are for -- but, hey: inhale, inhale, I'm the victim. I'm just worried that this plus the Advent Calendar could see me taken into residential care by twelfth night.
Next major post here -- as I know I've said before -- will be my interview with Tim Crouch and a smith. (I'm kicking myself for missing Tim in conversation with Karl James at Siobhan Davies last night -- anybody go?) And after that, the 'request' post I trailed a few weeks ago. I've chosen my subject now from the handful of submissions so we can consider that little interactive flurry now closed, ta v much.
Right. Best hit eject: got to be back at my post at 7am for you-know-what... xx
I know, I know. Believe me, I know. You don't come to Thompson's for easy listening. You come here for people who've somehow managed to connect a flange pedal to a cheese grater and are using it to reinterpret the works of Ligeti or Mission of Burma. But that's not what we're about right now, dudes and lady-dudes. I mean, pshaw, you wouldn't like it if you opened window 5 of your 2009 Gummi Bear [TM] Advent Calendar to find that it yielded not the anticipated Gummi Bear [TM] but rather, say, a small knot of razor wire covered in bat poo and dandelion milk. So today I'm very nearly unembarrassed to present a little selection of the loungey, the cocktaily, and the diffidently swingin'.
We begin with a track from the Bert Kaempfert Christmas Album, which I think I mentioned last year was, while I grew up, pretty much the one non-churchy LP available for seasonal spinning from the surprisingly extensive record collection of the Paternal Thompson Whom God Preserve. Those tinkledy-binkledy bells and the thunkity-plunkity bass have me back at the foot of the Goode family Christmas tree faster than Marcel Proust in a Santa hat could offer me a mint choc chip madeleine. You know me -- cosmopolitan, adventurous, a true global citizen -- but if there is anywhere on this planet a territory where Christmas doesn't sound like Bert Kaempfert going tinkledy-binkledy thunkity-plunkity, then I don't want to hear about it.
After a near-inevitable turn from Satchmo, we arrive at a curious number from Ella Fitzgerald -- a sweet but slight ditty which I find incredibly bothersome in Freudian terms. Santa got stuck -- open brackets -- in your chimney -- close brackets? Really? -- I mean, obviously not really really, but... that's what we're going to write a song about? And this isn't in any way... weird? What's worse, it sticks in your head like Montelimar nougat in your molars.
Then we have another Louis -- Mr Prima of that ilk, the under-appreciated bandleader who remains best known to us all as the voice of King Louie, the singer of "I Wanna Be Like You" in The Jungle Book -- before things take an odd turn with pastiche loungeur Richard Cheese (an American Mike Flowers, kinda) essaying an infectious, if not downright toxic, rendition of Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus". And finally, techno non-celebrity John Beltran posts a spiffy remix of Bing & Ella's "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer". This species of overhauled easy-listening classics for the ironic cocktail generation tends to produce dud after dud but I genuinely really like the effect Beltran achieves by looping two bars of the band -- the resulting track lopes along restlessly and, I find, makes a person's foot tap. (Well, it's Christmas. Caution to the wind, eh?)
So, there we are: hope you find something to enjoy today -- and let me warn you that you won't want to miss tomorrow. Unless, that is, you are a horrid old Scrooge with a pocket full of humbugs and a silly nightcap. Have a nice day, all!
Track listing:
1 Bert Kaempfert: Jumpin' Jiminy Christmas
2 Louis Armstrong: Cool Yule
3 Ella Fitzgerald: Santa Claus Got Stuck (In My Chimney)
4 Louis Prima: Shake Hands With Santa Claus
5 Richard Cheese: Personal Jesus
6 Bing Crosby & Ella Fitzgerald: Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer (John Beltran remix)
Nothing -- well, almost nothing... I mean, a talking candy-covered reindeer dragging behind it a plastic hamper containing gold, Frankenstein, myrrh, mistletoe & wine, and some kind of novelty windscreen-de-icing device for that despised uncle in your life -- but aside from that -- nothing says "Christmas" like a weak pun.
And so, welcome to December 4th, in which tracks by three gentlemen named or nicknamed 'King' are pressed into the service of an unconscionably feeble reference to a carol known to generations of schoolpersons only in a scurrilous parody version involving the sounding of hooters.
I was thinking just yesterday about my starring performance as Caspar (bling-bringing Wise Man #1, innit) in the school nativity play at the age of 6. I had an orange cardboard crown with a single little staple holding its intricacies all together; I can still remember the tiny, slightly rusted dark blue stapler with which the job was done -- the sweetness of which vertiginously nostalgic memory is tempered by the fact that the storage of this snapshot is presumably taking up RAM that might perhaps more helpfully contain other data that I would like to be able to remember, such as my credit card PIN or the date of my dad's birthday. In which light I was similarly both delighted and dismayed to note that I could remember my first line in the script: "I have come from far off lands, over fields and mountains, to be here with you. But why are you all so sad?" -- Or at least, I was delighted and dismayed (etc.) until I realised that the question "But why are you all so sad?" is entirely inappropriate to the nativity scene. I'm now pretty sure that must have been the end of my first line in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs the following year. That was the year I lied to the entire class that I knew how to tapdance -- I didn't at all, not a bit, I had merely been fascinated by Roy Castle's teatime tapdancing on Record Breakers -- and ended up being made to choreograph a tap routine for all the dwarfs to undertake. Many if not all of them were costumed in wellington boots. It was not a proud episode.
But I'm rambling now, like some ancient heap of a great auntie who, having insisted on everyone watching the Queen's Speech, nods off during it, overcome by the cumulative effect of four Baileys chocolates, and spends the next hour of the afternoon drooling and muttering in her fartful slumbers about the evils of decimalization and the loveliness of Jim Reeves. What else is there to say, though? None of these tracks requires further introduction.
I suppose I might issue a reassuring blandishment to those of you who may be privately fretting that, already, on only the fourth day of this recklessly otiose project, the bottom of the barrel is already being worn down thinner than the paper hat in a Tesco's Economy Cracker. Know, my dears, that this whole escapade has already been charted in advance, and that the best is being saved for later, as the big day draws nigh. At the moment, strictly speaking, you shouldn't even really be feeling Christmassy at all, and if today's tracks can do anything in helping to achieve that, then my time won't have been spent in vain.
Tomorrow, though! Ah, you won't want to miss tomorrow.
Track listing:
1 Ben E. King: Little Drummer Boy
2 Nat 'King' Cole: All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth
Sigh. When did the magic go out of Christmas? I'll tell you when. I'll tell you exactly when. With the invention of the stylophone. Oh, sure, it's all retro-tastic now, isn't it, the stylophone? Can't have a bad word said about it. But it was the thin end of the wedge, I tell you. Suddenly everyone could have space-age music technology in their bedrooms. Oh, sure, it's a fair cop: as a kid I too had a Yamaha keyboard with one-finger chord facility and a headspinning 99 rhythms. (Who, for the love of God, needs access to two different cajun rhythms within six feet of their bed?) And so, spool forward (if you will) to 2009, and already you can't move around here for marauding bands of eight year olds turning up on your doorstep with their Kaoss Pads and their Gristleism boxes, creating around their raggedy-ass renditions of 'Away in a Manger' a soundworld not dissimilar to the mid-80s heyday of Shriekback or Nitzer Ebb.
May I lay before you, then, an almost entirely instrument-free selection of carols and standards. (One saxophone solo sneaks through, the bastard.) Christmas, after all, is the rightful home of a cappella -- when else in the year could the Flying Pickets ever have had a number one single?
We begin in the cheerful realm of unaccompanied folk singing about shepherds; move suavely into the swirling harmonic caramel of the Singers Unlimited (whose bassist here, btw, is the guy who went "Ho! ho! ho!" -- though not in a Santa stylee -- on the old Green Giant ads); endure a minute or two in the company of Hanson (the only surviving relic from a boyband-themed day in which I very quickly lost interest); and end up in the loving embrace of the genre's current grandmasters, Take 6, whom thirtysomething Brits may recall more fondly as the grotesquely maligned (and presumably unwitting) house band on Victor Lewis Smith's Radio 1 shows in the very early 90s.
Enjoy these voices in all their voluptuous nudity, and I'll be back tomorrow with an entirely different kettle of festive fish.
Track listing:
1 Finest Kind: While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night
2 Singers Unlimited: It Came Upon A Midnight Clear
I don't know about you -- seriously, I honestly don't -- but one of the reasons I look forward so much to Christmas is that it's the one time of the year when I feel I can legitimately free from its workaday constraints my ineffable natural tendency towards the funk. Consequently, I couldn't wait a moment longer to present for your delectation a mini mixtape dedicated to all things groovy, bootycentric and generally frugagogodelic.
James Brown is, naturally, present and correct; so too, leaving us on a more up-to-date urban note, are the splendid TLC, managing to make even Leroy Anderson's stratospherically perky 'Sleigh Ride' sound completely the same as everything else they ever recorded.
But it's the unknown unknowns who carry the day here, I think. Radical poppet Akim reports back on Santa's soul quotient -- "He had an afro / He was really outta sight"...; Chicago's seventh finest Electric Jungle tell it like it is, or rather was in 1970 -- "Sho nuff funky Christmas Day," they explain, not a little ingenuously; and husband-and-wife duo Jim & Cathy (who subsequently divorced) spread some good news about Santa's sartorial satori. (Too much, huh?) And the whole shebang is ushered in by Thompson favourite mash-up wizard Lenlow, who immerses Augie Rios's 1958 hit in a swirly trifle of sweet sounds squeezed from Public Enemy and Les Rhythmes Digitales.
So, get up out of that thermal hammock, Gran'pa, and shake your red-nosed reindeer motif cummerbund at this little lot -- for, lo!, the Thompson's Christmas Funkateria is very definitely open for business -- the halls are decked with Kwanzaa candles and the tinsel is bum-shaped. In a good way.
Sho nuff see you tomorrow.
Track listing:
1 Lenlow: Donde Esta Santa Claus?
2 Akim & the Teddy Vann Production Company: Santa Claus is a Black Man
Welcome, one and all, old and young, rich and poor, tall and dwarfish, foreign and domestic, vegan and murderous hypocrite alike; welcome, slackers and Stakhanovists, radical queers and sticks-in-the-mud, of all sixteen Myers-Briggs personality types and of none. Welcome everybody to the pine-scented, lametta-bedecked, perilously sixpence-concealing Thompson's Bank of Communicable Desire Advent Calendar for 2009.
Each and every day between now and Christmas Eve, an aural window will be opened onto the Controlling Thompson's Mobility Grotto, whence a marvellous winterval tornado of seasonal soundfiles will be heard emanating with all the grim festive inexorability of other such contemporary yuletide phenomena as spray-on mistletoe and Nog-On-A-Stick. (Caution: may cause polychromatic laxative effect.)
Most days, you can expect a little mittenful of songs (sometimes a bit more), glued together with the near-arbitrary goo of thematic or generic resemblance. Today, we begin, as all good Christian folk should, with a consideration of the true meaning of the season: videlicet, the Muppets.
A couple of tracks from the classic Christmas album that the googly-eyed fuzzmeisters cut in 1979 with that fingerpicking quintessence of fill-up-yer-senses-like-a-night-in-the-forest wholesomeness, John Denver, bookend a much more recent erotic chestnut from Miss Piggy, and an insistent Sesame Street doo-wop fantasia from 1984.
This is not the last you'll hear from the Muppets as this calendar slowly sheds its toxic load over the coming weeks. But hopefully it's the perfect way to begin this pointless and yet curiously laborious exercise. Enjoy, my co-conspiring muppedophiles, and I'll see you here again tomorrow for something completely different.
Track listing:
1 John Denver & The Muppets: The Twelve Days of Christmas
2 Miss Piggy: Santa Baby
3 The Sesame Street Doo Wahs: Counting the Days
4 John Denver & Rowlf the Dog: Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas
Well, so, my dumps have been enshrined in showbiz history, playmates. I have become the official Guardian posterboy for artistic despair. Serves me right, and I can't stop giggling at the URL of the post in question, which is:
Well, quite. Thanks again to everyone who shouted encouragement. Of course I'm not going to give up. What else would I do? I am monumentally unfit for all other human practice and enterprise. A couple of well-wishers used the phrase "keep on truckin'", which reminded me that the results of my sixth form careers aptitude test indicated that, by some considerable margin, the job I was most suited for in life was road haulage manager. (So close.)
Anyway, despite the anxieties I aired in my last, I've spent quite a pleasant week writing and shaping The Forest and the Field and I'm interested now to see how it might go down. So, do come if you can.
Also, I took delivery this afternoon of a proof copy of The History of Airports, and I'm pretty pleased. For a POD job it's not too shabby at all. So now the presses can roll. I'm not quite sure what that entails, but in my imaginings it's very much like this:
At any rate I now feel all the more confident in urging you to pre-order the book (for the special price of £10 +p&p), which you can do through the Lean Upstream web site, and which you'll shortly be able to do from this site also.
The book launch event, by the way, has moved again, this time to Sunday 29th, still at STK as per the side bar (over there >>>). This is to avoid a clash with the last ever Openned at the Foundry, which I imagine most right-thinking people (including myself) will feel they want to attend. The Foundry has been a great location over the years and Openned in particular have done fantastically important work there; it's absolutely nauseating to be losing it.
Mostly this post is just to fill y'all in on what lies ahead at Thompson's in weeks to come.
The next major post will be a transcript of my recent conversation with Tim Crouch and a smith, which they very generously made time for on The Author's last day at the Royal Court. I'm excited to listen back to it all, though I think it might be quite an undertaking to turn it into text, as I remember a lot of words quite tightly packed in to our hour together...
After that, Thompson's takes its customary winter wonderland lurch towards muso-obsessiveness. The 2009 Furtive 50 rundown of the year's most ear-pleasing albums will hopefully be going up a little bit ahead of Christmas this year, so as to help with those last minute gifts for strange people who are difficult to buy for and seem to like peculiar music. And also -- contain your excitement now, little ones -- I'm going to be doing an audio advent calendar: so there'll be a new consignment of jingle-bellery every day for you to listen to and enjoy or not as you see fit.
No doubt there'll also be one of those reflective end-of-year pipe-smoking posts, possibly in the gap between Christmas and New Year. I want to remember to say something about Bob.
But I think there's room in the schedule for one more post, and I thought it might be fun or interesting or something to take requests. I will undertake to generate a substantial post, sometime between now and December 31st, on any topic prescribed by any Thompson's reader. Suggestions may be lodged in the comments field here, or by email. I'll pick one more or less at random, with perhaps some moderate (but far from conclusive) weighting towards those who I know have been particularly close or committed readers. -- Normally my attempts to engage Friends Of Thompson in this kind of vaguely bogus-looking way fall coldwater flat: exempli gratia, the resoundingly 100% unentered Thompson's Christmas Quiz competition of 2007. But I hope this new wheeze at least places less grotesque impedimenta in the way of the, er, fun and interesting part than did that quiz debacle.
There's absolutely no constraint on what the topic is, it needn't be within a million miles of any of the subjects we normally discuss here. An independent adjudicator will oversee the selection and ensure, if not impartiality, then no more than a gentlemanly degree of bias.
So, please, let your mind wander freely, and propose your topic. Any time between now and the end of November will do.
Let me announce, also, finally, that Thompson's will be on sabbatical during January and February 2010. I have another project -- two, in fact -- into which I need to be pouring whatever writing energies I may by then be capable of generating. Given that the blog quite frequently lapses into month-long silences anyway, I don't suppose it will make much difference to anybody, but for the sake of transparency...
Maybe see you tomorrow at Lawrence's birthday corroboree, or next week at The Forest and the Field -- and if neither of these, then somewhere down the crazy river, right?
NEW!CG and Jonny Liron (poetry + performance) at the Klinker, alongside Wolf Gang (unmissable! - Alison Blunt, Susanna Ferrar, Sylvia Hallett, Hannah Marshall) + Bed Shitting. Tuesday 8th December, 9pm. Tottenham Chances, 399 Tottenham High Road, London N17. (Tottenham Hale / Seven Sisters tube.) £5 (£3 concs.)
THE HISTORY OF AIRPORTS
Chris Goode's The History of Airports: Selected texts for performance 1995-2009 is now available from Ganzfeld.
The 228pp book can be ordered exclusively through this blog and costs just £12 + p&p. (£1.95 UK only; £3.95 rest of world.)
To order the book online and pay via PayPal, please select an option below.
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I WANT MY COPY OF
Copy Of: the seminal 2000 album by COAT (Jeremy Hardingham & Chris Goode): now available for download at iTunes - click on the image. (Also available from Amazon [mp3 download only], eMusic, Napster &c.)
Voices from Palestine (via globalvoicesonline.org)
