The Blah Blah Blah Show

The Captain's Tower: Seventy Poets Celebrate Bob Dylan at Seventy

2011-05-16T11:47:00.000-07:00

Nine months from conception to birth, with three fathers and seventy bobparents, 'The Captain's Tower: Seventy Poets celebrate Bob Dylan at Seventy' was published on May 11th 2011 by Seren books. Edited by Phil Bowen, Damian Furniss and David Woolley with a foreword by Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood, all information is here:

http://thecaptainstowerdylanbook.blogspot.com/

The Captain's Tower: Seventy Poets Celebrate Bob Dylan at Seventy

2010-10-04T12:47:00.000-07:00

The Captain’s Tower: Seventy Poets Celebrate Bob Dylan at Seventy

JEWELS & BINOCULARS, published by Stride/Westwords in 1993, featured fifty poets who celebrated the life and work of Bob Dylan and his influence on their own. Among them were Wendy Cope, Allen Ginsberg, Sophie Hannah, Lachlan Mackinnon, Glyn Maxwell, Adrian Mitchell, Linda Chase, Geoff Hattersley and Matthew Sweeney.

The book is out of print and has become a collector’s item. A changing revue of poets and musicians played venues from London’s Troubadour to the West Yorkshire Playhouse to promote its publication.

On May 24th 2011 Bob Dylan will reach seventy, after almost fifty years in the music industry. To mark the occasion, SEREN will publish THE CAPTAIN’S TOWER: SEVENTY POETS CELEBRATE BOB DYLAN AT SEVENTY. It will combine the best from the original with new work from established and up-and-coming writers.

Among submissions already received are poems by Roddy Lumsden, Luke Wright, Simon Armitage, Tamar Yoseloff, Mark Ford, Jeremy Reed, Matthew Caley, Tim Dooley, Peter Finch and Roger McGough. Others are arriving daily from all over the world. We’d be delighted to hear from other poets and of other poems. Contact thecaptainstower@gmail.com

By the end of the year we hope to have collected seventy poems by seventy writers. An accompanying tour is being scheduled for Spring and Summer 2011.

We are asking all authors to donate their royalties to CRISIS, the charity for the homeless that Bob Dylan chose as the UK beneficiary of the proceeds of his Christmas in the Heart album.

Editorial Policy

· Submissions are welcome and should be sent to thecaptainstower@gmail.com

· The deadline for submissions is December 10th 2010.

· Submissions will only be provisionally accepted by unanimity of the editors – Phil Bowen, Damian Furniss and David Woolley.

· Shortlisted submissions won’t be confirmed for publication until early 2011.

· Publication will be in May 2011.

· Any previous publication should be noted and will be credited. Copyright will remain with the author.

· We expect most accepted submissions to come from established writers with one or more collections published by well known publishers. However, exceptional work by less known writers will be considered.

· In the submission email, the poet should state his or her willingness to be published in the first and any future editions of the book, their royalties going to Crisis in perpetuity.

· He or she should also provide a biographical note saying when and how Bob Dylan most deeply touched their lives.

· Contributors will receive a copy of the book and may be invited to participate in performances marking the publication.

· Information on any poems relating to Bob Dylan already in existence would be much appreciated, with contact details of the poet if possible.

Editors

Phil Bowen has published four collections of poetry, his first full collection, ‘Variety’s Hammer’ (Stride) being selected for inclusion in The Forward Anthology of 1998. His last collection ‘Starfly’ was also published by Stride in 2004. ‘Nowhere’s Far: New and Collected Poems 1990–2008’ was published by Salt in 2009 and recently reviewed in Poetry Review, to be followed by ‘Cuckoo Rock’, his first collection for children, later in 2010.

He is the editor of two Stride anthologies: ‘Jewels & Binoculars’ (fifty poets celebrate Bob Dylan) and ‘Things We Said Today’ (poetry about the Beatles). He has also written four plays : ‘A Handful of Rain’ – an imagined meeting between Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas, ‘A Case of the Poet’, ‘Parlez Vous Jig Jig’ and ‘Anything but Love’ – in which Dorothy Parker meets the lyricist Dorothy Fields.

Born in Liverpool in 1949 ,where he taught Drama until 1979, he now lives in Newlyn in Cornwall and works all over the country as a freelance writer, performer and teacher.

Damian Furniss is a poet whose first full collection, ‘Chocolate Che’, was published by Shearsman Books earlier in 2010, and recently highly commended in the Forward prize for best first collection. His pamphlet ‘The Duchess of Kalighat’ won the Tears in the Fence competition.

His poetry, prose and reviews have been widely published in magazines and anthologies and he has read at festivals and arts centres around the country and at the Indian High Commission. He is currently working on two novels: Shin Kicking and Life Before Death. He is the co-host of Blah Blah Blah, an arts magazine radio show on Phonic FM.

Conceived on the night England won the Football World Cup, he was educated at King Edward VI Grammar School, Stratford-Upon-Avon (where he was taught in the same room as Shakespeare) and Keble College, Oxford. He lives in the West Country and works in social care.

David Woolley is a poet, performer, writer, tutor, broadcaster and arts consultant. He has published three collections of poetry, the most recent of which, ‘Pursued by a Bear’ (Headland Publications) was launched in June 2010. He edited and published Westwords arts magazine and poetry press for ten years.

He was the inaugural Chair of the National Association for Literature Development, Chair of Festivals of Wales for three years, and has been on the Boards of Dylan Thomas Prize Ltd, Swansea Fringe Festival, and the Advisory Panel for New Welsh Review.

Between 1996 and 2010 he was Literature Adviser for City & County of Swansea and Arts Programmer for the Dylan Thomas Centre where he directed the annual Dylan Thomas Festival. He is currently a regional literature officer for the Arts Council.

Damian Furniss reading from 'Chocolate Che' at the Dylan Thomas Festival in Swansea on Friday 30th October at 19.30

2010-10-01T12:40:00.000-07:00

Damian Furniss will be reading from 'Chocolate Che' at the Dylan Thomas Festival, the Dylan Thomas Centre, Swansea on October 30th 2010 at 19.30.

He'll be reading with Gwyneth Lewis, National Poet of Wales 2005-6 and published by Bloodaxe.

Damian Furniss reading from 'Chocolate Che' at Exeter Central Library on Sunday October 10th at 14.00

2010-10-01T12:28:00.000-07:00

The inaugural Exeter Poetry Festival takes place 7 - 10 October 2010 in Exeter Central Library and other venues round the city.

I'll be reading at 14.00 with Elisabeth Bletsoe and Jaime Robles - a Shersman Showcase.

Immediately before at 12.30 Rachel McCarthy, Rachael Boast and Fiona Benson will be performing - under the Excite banner.

There are too many other readings of note to list but you can find all the details here.

I was also joint winner of the Exeter Poetry Festival postcard competition so look out for the offending item round town publicising the event.

Finally, this month's The Blah Blah Blah Show, http://www.phonic.fm/ or 106.8FM in the Exeter area, on Sunday 3rd October 12.00 - 14.00 will be an Exeter Poetry Festival featuring Liv Torc and anyone else we can muster. Liv is one of the best performance poets on the circuit, Bard of Exeter and Exeter poetry Festival poet in residence so not to be missed.

Poem from 'Chocolate Che' by Damian Furniss in the Forward Book of Poetry 2011

2010-10-01T12:13:00.000-07:00

'The Duchess of Kalighat' from 'Chocolate Che' by Damian Furniss is published in the Forward Book of Poetry 2011 which claims to be an anthology of the best poems of the year, gathering together those shortlisted and highly commended in the Forward prizes for best collection, best first collection and best poem.

Given 'The Duchess of Kalighat' was first drafted circa 1992 and published in 1995 I'm not sure if that makes me ahead of my time or everything I've written since lagging behind but it is pleasing to see four poems by Shearsman poets in the book, within spitting distance of Faber and Bloodaxe.

Excite Exeter Poetry Update for September

2010-09-01T13:27:00.000-07:00

For your delectation this month:
Liv Torc, wondermentalist, Radio 4 South West Slam winner and poet in residence for the Exeter Poetry Festival, launches her new book, 'Dancing Naked in Banana Land' at Otto Retro, next Thursday, 9th September. Doors open 7.30pm, for 8pm start. £7/6 conc all night, £5 from 9pm. Open mic 8-9pm. Liv performed for us to a packed out house in December and we're glad to have her back. A cracking night is guaranteed. If you've seen Liv perform you know I'm telling the truth, if you haven't you'll believe me next week.

Open mic spaces can be booked by replying to this email address, or on 07854598552. Please forward attached publicity to interested parties.

Budleigh Salterton Literature Festival is back for a second year, with Carol Ann Duffy as the headline guest, the weekend of the 24th of Spetember. A jam-packed Fringe is also planned for the Saturday (25th), including a cafe/bar style evening of poetry. Open mic spaces for this are limited and can be booked by contacting Hilary Ackland at hilaryackland@btinternet.com or on 01395 444406. Please see the attached publicity for further information.

Fringes are often the life-blood of festivals, so please show your support.
October sees the first ever Exeter Poetry Festival, see http://exeterpoetryfestival.wordpress.com/
for the full line-up. The Otto, funky junk poetry night that month will be an open mic extravaganza! Free! with wine and nibbly things provided. Let's kick the festival off in style! Slots for the ExCite Festival Open Mic can be booked now, contact me on the email address above or on 07854598552. They will go quickly, so get typing.

Finally, some may have spotted our website http://www.rachelmccarthy.com/ is currently static. The website is being redeveloped, and should be available soon.

'Chocolate Che' by Damian Furniss reviewed by John Gimblett in Stride Magazine

2010-09-01T11:51:00.000-07:00

A review of 'Chocolate Che' by Damian Furniss recently published in Stride Magazine and written by John Gimblett writer of an Indian travelogue that covers some of the same ground as '|The Duchess of Kalighat'.
Sparse Soul

In this highly enjoyable volume, Damian Furniss travels the world writing about his experiences and recording observations. There are poems from Cuba in the fiftieth year of the revolution, amongst the dead and dying in India, through the Americas and in Europe 'on the trail of soldiers, artists and monks'.

Furniss's verse is tight throughout, with nothing extraneous, nothing wasted. For example, in the poem 'If Art Was a Car': 'If art was a car, I'd take this line for a spin / ...just because I can - / ...now that would be a day, a day worth living.'

Immediately, I'm seeing a Kerouac moment unfurling before me. Again, this tautness of language is shown in 'Che in Disguise':

Plucked bald as a yam,
Grey streaked in the minge
That remains of his mane.

I can imagine, in my head, the poem being read by William Burroughs in that throaty, Southern drawl of his.

There is an easy, atmospheric sense to the Cuba poems in this volume – slow, lounging, sassy. Look at this from 'See That My Bones Are Kept Clean':

When I'm gone, do not moan
On my long, unbroken bones
But chink your ringed fingers
On tumblers well slung
With slugs of darkest rum..

There's an easy natural pressure (not a force) at rhyme here, and the words slip over the tongue just like that rum must have done.

'Bee Movie' is, again, a close, tight poem full of space and clever rhymes (both end- and mid-line) that masterfully exploit order and form. Got to know the rules to break the rules – ask Picasso.

Edith -
A pigtail-threaded hat,
Face like a shaven cat,
Eyes of charcoal, burning.

Elva -
Lean as a guinea pig,
More skirts than a whirligig,
Scarlet poncho, twirling.

And speaking of the artist himself, in '9 + 1 = Picasso', IV Furniss pulls Wordsworth right into the 21st century: 'Art is the child of a man / And a mountain of men.'

Furniss can be earthy, sexual without pretence of cloakedness, and has the skill and the confidence to carry it off successfully, such as in 'House of the Genius', III:

A rabbit, skinned and stewed,
is a gift, or pigeon, well-plucked;

pets are loved to be killed,
and friends like you to be fucked.

You can imagine sitting around with Furniss, perhaps even sipping a mint tea in the Petit Socco in Tangier, around the corner from Burroughs's old room, and him pulling the glass away from his lips momentarily to pronounce 'You cannot lose a cat / As you can lose a mind - / They just go missing..' ('Found Lost Sign').

Well, I can.

A poem such as 'Old Iron' explores the past: journeys, origins and beginings; exquisite, tailored -

The sunburnt moor of Zennor
The last flag of shore he saw.

On his tod against the waves
To bank the world's last cod

The more one reads this book, the more it divides into its three sections. The middle section is titled My White Ghosts and I think it's the most successful, the most complete, though that isn't a judgment on the rest of the book.

There are some points where Goar's and Furniss's books cross - and one of these is my mention of a zen quality - and subject matter - to some of the language. In this book's 'Darshan with Dalai Lama' Furniss draws on a zen koan; if you meet the buddha on the road, kill him. 'I am here to kill the Dalai Lama.'

The idea is to strip everything down; to begin again from the ground up. Or as the sufis say: Die before you die. As if to demonstrate his zen sensibility, Furniss quotes the explorer, traveller and zen monk Peter Matthiessen at one point.

He explores death sensitively and with great maturity in the poem 'The Great British Cemetery':

Some went to rest with children still eggs inside them, others with
children beside them, ten in a dozen, baptised by fever or dead in
childbed.

And in 'Holi at Nirmal Hriday' there is this inescapable (well, for Calcutta) meld of death and politics:

For a moment I unlearn my politics,
see a man empty his lungs onto his bed,
kneel beside him and rub his chest.

But a joining of the two with the poet firmly in control and in attendance. And again, I'm going to have to say it, a confidence that can in poets only come from experience and a thorough slog through a lifetime of writing towards... completion. A realisation, almost an awakening.

Furniss understands Calcutta at this essential level, for example (in 'New Life in Hospice') when describing the discovery of a rats' nest. I see this as a metaphor for Calcutta's poor. It's a beautiful poem, redolent of (in my mind) Seamus Heaney's Blackberries through its images; its metaphors. The rats in Furniss's Calcutta are the squashed, vivid fruit in Heaney's: straining, strained.

We found a rats' nest:
stirring balls of pink baldness,
glued eyes still blind as pennies.
...
even vermin are sacred
to the dying.

It represents a poet in control of his craft, his art. In fact, as does this entire volume, which I enjoyed immensely on so many levels.

(c) John Gimblett

Bike Shed Theatre August newsletter (click to read)

2010-08-06T13:35:00.000-07:00

'Chocolate Che' by Damian Furniss reviewed by Steve Spence in Stride Magazine

2010-08-01T11:32:00.000-07:00

A review of 'Chocolate Che' by Damian Furniss recently published in Stride Magazine and written by Steve Spence, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for best first collection of poetry in 2010. Good luck Steve!

More complex stuff

Damian Furniss is a fantastic reader of his poetry and his work translates wonderfully to the page. The three sections relate to periods of travel, mainly in Cuba and in India, and the central selection - My White Ghosts - is comprised of poems inspired in various ways by painters and their work. Of the latter, I was particularly taken by 'Bacon Dust', where we get:

The art connoisseur
Will say 'Vintage stuff!'
As he gets a nose
of this fragrant muff,
Snort it like coke
Or sniff it like snuff,
A line or a pinch -
Pure bacon dust.

These are poems which generally scan and often rhyme in traditional ways and they are very satisfying to read or hear read out. Furniss has a knack of combining a sense of the 'importance' of his subject which an earthy injection of the frailties of the body and the dangers of romanticising. This is most evident in 'Che's Hands', a puzzling, riddling poem where he explores the notion of Che as martyr of the Cuban revolution:

Che's grave is not Che's grave.
And the bones in it are not Che's.
And those photos of the dead Che
as Christ, with the generals playing
Romans, display neither Christ,
nor Che, nor Romans. And his wounds
are not wounds as we know them.
And if you say that Che was a saint,
You either did not meet that Che
or you have never met a saint.

I can remember reading a piece by John Berger, years ago, suggesting the iconic links between the corpse of Che and that of Christ and while Berger in his own way is deeply involved in deconstructing images he comes from a very different place from Furniss. You get the feeling from reading these poems that Furniss is a poet who has seen a fair bit of the dark side of life and of death in his early travels around the world and his take on things has a more spiritual resonance. I admire this poem and what I take to be its 'argument', despite the fact that I still have a soft spot for Noam Chomsky and wish that American foreign policy really could become a force for good in the world.

Poems about paintings often 'miss the mark' but Furniss is an exception to that 'rule'. In particular his pieces on Egon Schiele and Edward Hopper capture something of the backdrop, the mood, the style and milieu of the respective painters:

I can take lines for a wicked walk
with my fingers, nibbed like quills;
smear on swabs of colour with
the pads of idle thumbs. ...

(from 'Nip the Bud')

which manages both an amusing aside to Paul Klee and to express something of the 'disturbing meatiness' of Schiele's work.

He flips the sign
from open to closed, dims
the lights, and dusk comes in
from where the road merges
with a smothering of trees.

(from 'Gas,1940')

Hopper appears as the American equivalent of De Chirico, where the emptiness of the landscape has an ominous quality of its own and where people are marginal and their psychology goes unexplored. Road movies where the subject is the road.

There's a jaunty side to Furniss' work, expressed in taut rhythms and debunking relish:

He wore a marzipan beret,
Its insignia that rarity-
A perfect star-shaped strawberry-
To strip the comandante
Who took the I from industry
Of the badge that gave him dignity.

They gagged him with a Cadbury's flake
Imported by the C.I.A.
And stretched him on a rack of cane
Lashed onto a Chevrolet,
Carved him up at Gitmo Bay
With harvest blunt machetes-

(from 'Chocolate Che')
The excess of the American Dream, a consumer glut inside a horror story like the final act of a Shakespearean tragedy. This is more complex stuff than it first seems and Damian Furniss has put together a collection that demands to be read and re-read. A triumph.

Exeter Fringe at The Bike Shed Theatre: 'Bloody Women' and 'Up the Gary'

2010-07-03T08:45:00.000-07:00

Exeter Summer Festival is a curious affair, bringing together events at the city's main venues (the Phoenix, Cornmarket, Northcott, Barnfield etc) that would probably be happening anyway with a handful of set piece events such as the unleashing of Theo Jansen's strandbeest onto Exmouth beach and Princesshay, a craft fair on Cathedray Green and a party on the streets on July 10th.

This year it has its fringe - 65 productions by 20 companies in the 11 days between 23rd June and 3rd July at The Bike Shed Theatre with tickets mainly a fiver a pop and six shows from noon til midnight to choose from. It is a shame that the main festival organisers didn't see fit to give it more publicity in their programme, because it brings together a wide range of productions, many by innovative and multi-cultural touring companies who wouldn't otherwise pass through the city and includes comedy, music and dance as well as drama.

Circumstances did deny me the opportunity to see most of them but last night I did what fringe goers do: turn up and catch what happesd to be on, knowing no more than the single line synopses that tag the posters that have been pasted up around town. And what I got was two productions that you'd rarely see booked at the same space, let alone back-to-back on the same evening.

'Bloody Women' is described as 'An epic tale populated by sexually depraved goddesses, witches, a dog-boy, warriors, a stoic wife and a lot of blood - Ulster myths dragged kicking and screaming into the present.' It began its life as a one woman show by Emer O'Connor but Kerry Irvine of Scenepool's direction and production has added an extra dimension with Charlie Henry on cello and vocals delivering Irish folk songs that give the dramatically realised folk tales haunting counterpoint.

The Ulster myths that inform the production are made present not so much by political subtext as an examination of the power of women in myth and society using archteypes of the mother, the daughter, the witch, the seductress and the warrior. The interlinking texts are delivered with real physicality and in direct and beautifully pitched language as ceremonies of retelling involving washing and blood and the laying out of circles of grain as an arena in which magic can happen. And it does.

The pitch for 'Up the Gary' - 'from top of the pops to the bottom of the barrel, the rise and fall of an ordinary Gary Glitter tribute artist - would seem to have more popular appeal as the Bike Shed filled to capacity and the glitter beat began to rock the house. Written by Andrew Barron with Jessica Beck this one man show delivers all that you might expect but less than it promised. Setting itself up as a very English comedy of embrarassment, the piece delivered on entertainment of the nostalgia for nostalgia kind, dealing nimbly with the rise, but was a missed opportunity to take-on audience expectations, by being clumsy in playing out the fall. For many in the house, the climax seemed to be karaoke Gary as he blinked wide-eyed into the spotlight. Plenty of pathos then, but not enough bathos to get beyond The Stars in their Eyes and into the private lives of the impersonated and impersonator and how the former brought both opportunity and tragedy to the latter.

Cinema: Whatever Works

2010-06-27T11:38:00.000-07:00

Larry David has been swallowed whole and passed through the bowels of Woody Allen onto a Manhattan street where they both belong. After 'Vicky Cristina Barcelona', which did a creditable impression of a Pedro Almodovar movie and was the auteur's most enjoyable outing in years, the portents weren't good.

For a start, while I love Larry David when he plays Larry David, I seriously doubt whether he can play anyone else. He is a Jewish New Yorker trapped in the body and mind of a Jewish New Yorker. Fortunately, the third most famous man to answer to that description is given his own skin by the first. What doesn't work is his notional day job as a nuclear physicist, but strip the script of the occasional quantum reference and nobody would miss much. Better to have made him a retired comic writer and be done with it.

That aside, Larry David plays Larry David and plays him well. He gets to deliver some Woody Allen lines that are more thought through than his usual Curb Your Enthusiasm improvisations, but they seem no less spontaneous; Larry's sounds like a stand-up even in the most mundane of conversations, and while he doesn't have the genius of a near Nobel prize winning scientist, he does have a knack at gnawing at the bones of a conversation until they miraculously regrow meat.

Woody Allen movies generally feature versions of himself; in recent years, they've put the Woody-Woody-would-like-to-be rather than the Woody-Woody-has-now-become centre stage, which isn't to say Boris/Larry is the kind of somebody anybody else would aspire to. Infact, he's a misanthropic loner who seems to have given up on his higher calling to spend his days sharing his solipsistic observations and bleak cosmological musings with his cafe cronies and abusing would-be chess prodigies and pretty much anyone else he encounters while patrolling his neighbourhood. Plagued by nervous tics and prone to conversational tropes, he is the stupid genius who doesn't even seem that bright.

Then a southern belle walks into his life; a Briney Spears before she was famous, spouting Mickey Mouse dreams and sweet as a cream filled twinkie. Melody is played by Evan Rachel Wood who at least has to act out a part; as sleight and vapid as her role might be, the girl can act. She is everything Woody wants - young, pretty and cute in a stupid-assed way. Moreover, she's willing to marry a cranky old fuck and feed him crayfish pie and viagra. Her arrival and their year long union is wholly unbelievable, but whoever said comic situations require credibility to be funny. Woody goes just as far as he likes with the scenario, turning her Waco (as in Texas) parents into wacko (as in Manhattan) born-again bohemians, and getting the best out of the supporting cast in the process.

I went into the cinema wondering why I was there. It was the sunniest day of the year outside and the only other member of the audience might have stepped straight out of the New York cafe where Boris hangs out having had too many crispy cremes and cafe lattes. He laughed like a cat choking up a hair ball. All of Woody Allen's films these days seem half-thought through and half-finished, sketches either of greater works or projects his younger self would've discarded. But Woody Allen is Woody Allen. And Larry David is Larry David. If you love either, you will forgive this film its faults and find much to like, the old moment to love if laugh-out-loud moments are your chosen symptoms of comic romance. 'Whatever Works' just about works despite itself and turns feel-bad into feel-good like only a couple of Jewish comic geniuses from New York can.

Book Launch: 'Chocolate Che' and 'On the Governing of Empires'

2010-06-27T09:11:00.000-07:00

Book Launch: A Message from our Sponsor

2010-06-27T08:11:00.000-07:00

A very sunny evening to you all (sunny for the majority of the week, in fact...)

Firstly, thank you all who came to see Carrie Etter last Thursday. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Feedback on the space for future readings is very welcome. You can follow Carrie's adventures here:

http://carrieetter.blogspot.com/

Secondly, the next event will be the home-launch of books by two Exeter poets. On July 1st, Damian Furniss will be reading from his first full length collection, Chocolate Che, alongside Alasdair Paterson, reading from his new book On the Governing of Empires at the Devon and Exeter Institution. Publicity attached - please forward to interested parties.

You can read more about their books here:

http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2010/furniss.html
http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2010/paterson.html

The event is FREE. No, that wasn't a typo, FREE, wine and nibbles provided.

We've had a good run with guests at ExCite Poetry lately, and I'm jolly well looking forward to this, I hope to see lots of you there.

All the best, as ever,

Rachel
(Yes. It's free...)
--

Rachel McCarthy,
Poetry Society Representative for East Devon
email: stanza AT rachelmccarthy.com
website: www.rachelmccarthy.com

Simon Persighetti and Phil Smith invite you to join them for a ‘Tour of Sardine Street’

2010-06-26T09:30:00.000-07:00

Since late 2007 Simon Persighetti (poet, playwright and performer) and Phil Smith (author of ‘Mythogeography’) have been regularly walking, researching, exploring and performing on one street: Queen Street in Exeter. Now, after a number of ‘test runs’ with other walkers, they have prepared a ‘mis-guided tour’ of the street and would like to invite interested members of the public to join them for a tour.
Phil Smith (The Crab Man) said: “Allowing ourselves more than two years to prepare, we have built up an awareness not only of many of the unseen or ignored details of Queen Street, but we have also seen how it can change radically in short spaces of time – it has a life cycle and a heart beat!”

The tours all begin at the Dinosaur Café at the northern end of Queen Street (at its junction with the New North Road), next to the Miles Clock Tower.
These tours will last between 90 minutes to 2 hours, but walkers are requested to be free for 3 hours (occasionally the guides have been spontaneously invited to visit certain closed areas of the street and would like to be free to respond to any similar invitations).

The times of the tours are as follows:
9th July (Friday) 10am – 1pm

9th July (Friday) 2pm – 5pm

10th July (Saturday) 10am – 1pm

15th July (Thursday) 10am – 1pm

15th July (Thursday) 2pm – 5pm

16th July (Friday) 10am – 1pm

Numbers are very limited (a maximum of seven people for each walk) – those interested should make a booking by email to perform.smith AT ukgateway.net

Exeter Summer Festival: The Fringe at the Bike Shed

2010-06-23T09:57:00.000-07:00

Ladies and gentlemen, Particular Theatre Company Supporters, Bike Shed Theatre afficionados,

THE FRINGE IS IN

65 Performances, 21 Companies, 11 Days, 1 Venue

Following the most eventful six months in our (fairly) young lives, The Bike Shed Theatre is closing this season with 11 days of back to back performances. From dance to theatre, comedy and musicals companies from across the UK will be delighting our stage with entertainment for all.

The Fringe Festival will kick off at 2pm today with An Arrangement of Shoes, a touching one woman show about family life in an Indian Railway colony. This is an award winning new play which will give you an idea of the wonders we have lined up over the next couple of weeks.

Also on my personal list of "must sees" are Up The Gary; a musical performance about the rise and fall of a Gary Glitter Tribute artist which promises to have the audience in stitches, and Stuck in the Throat a play of stories which follows three people who are unsure what should be shared and what should remain a secret. These are topped off by our first stand up comedy at The Bike Shed Theatre, Shazia Mirza and Susan Murray are both national calibre comedians who will be previewing their Edinburgh shows on the Bike Shed Stage. You can find more details of these shows and many more on our website www.bikeshedtheatre.co.uk/fringe/ where you will also be able to buy your tickets for the shows.
The festival is bringing companies from far and wide into Exeter, please support these performers, lets show them that this city is still craving for quality entertainment.

This will mark the end of our season at The Bike Shed Theatre, following the festival we will be closing our doors for refurbishments and preparing to come back in the autumn with a whole new program of entertainment. We hope to see you walk through our doors over the course of the next 11 days.
Enjoy the Fringe!
David, Fin and Debs

The Bike Shed Theatre

Art: Theo Jansen at Exeter Summer Festival

2010-06-20T09:49:00.000-07:00

Theo Jansen: Artist's Talk

Friday 2 July, 7pm at Exeter Central Library (Music Room), £6/£4 concessions.

An illustrated talk by Theo Jansen providing an insight into his work over the years with details of the new strandbeest, Ventosa Siamesis.

To book a place please contact Spacex:
t: 01392 431788, e: info@spacex.org.uk.Booking essential.

Theo Jansen: Public Demonstration

Friday 25 - Sunday 27 June, between 11am - 5pm on Exmouth beach, (Carlton Slipway east of the Pavilion), free.

Exclusive live demonstrations of Theo Jansen's new strandbeest, Ventosa Siamesis. This is the first unveiling of this new work. The strandbeest will be in operation on the beach between 11am - 5pm and Jansen will be present from 3 - 5pm (except Friday, when his assistant will be present).

A smaller strandbeest (four metres long) will be available for audiences to interact with and learn how the beach creatures walk.

Theo Jansen: Public Demonstration

Friday 2 - Sunday 4 July, between 11am - 5pm in Exeter city centre, free.

Following the live demonstrations of Theo Jansen's new strandbeest on Exmouth beach, the beach creature will appear in Exeter city centre in Princesshay Square. The strandbeest will be in operation between 11am - 5pm and Jansen will be present from 3 - 5pm.

A smaller strandbeest (four metres long) will be available for audiences to interact with and learn how the beach creatures walk.

Exhibition at The Spacex Gallery, Exeter

15 May - 3 July 2010

Internationally renowned Dutch artist and engineer Theo Jansen has been developing mechanical, skeletal like sculptures for the last 20 years. Jansen has named these creations strandbeests, which translates as beach animals. The strandbeests are self-propelling engineered creatures which are powered by the wind.

Spacex has co-produced this project for which the artist is creating a major new work, a Siamese twin version of his last work, named Ventosa Siamesis. Each of the twins will be approximately 10 metres long and, under the guidance of the artist, this enormous creature will explore Exmouth beach from 25–27 June, before arriving in Exeter city centre, to coincide with Exeter Summer Festival from 2–4 July.

In addition Spacex is showcasing the first UK exhibition of the artist’s work at the gallery from 15 May–3 July 2010.

http://www.spacex.co.uk/

Cinema review: The Milk of Sorrow

2010-06-16T11:29:00.000-07:00

La Teta Asustada is set in contemporary Peru but looks back to the troubles of the 1980s when the country was at virtual civil war between Sendero Luminoso, a ruthless Maoan revolutionary organisation that also took inspiration from Inca resistance movements to Spanish imperialism, and a military that often acted above the law and in many parts of the country were the law which thet despatched with summary justice.

The literal translation of the title is 'the frightened teat' and the film's central concern is the abuse of women during the conflict by both sides and its long-term effects on them and their offspring, many of whom were born from rape; the belief the title alludes to is that the trauma of a violent conception is transmitted to the child through her mother's milk.

The director, Claudia Llosa, is the niece of Peru's best known novelist Mario Vargas Llosa but she draws on a wider range of material for her script than fiction, although magical realism and folk tale are both woven into the texture of the books, including psychological and sociological studies that exposed mass rape as explicit strategies deployed by both sides.

This suggests a heavy watch but the movie, set in the barrios that extend for miles over the desert hills surrounding Lima, is also a charming evocation of village life transplanted to a more urban and less rooted existence. In particular, weddings and wedding customs parade through the film, bringing families and communities together to celebrate their camaraderie, play out their tensions and seed new romances among the guests.

Magaly Solier's central performance as Fausta, a near mute and painfully shy.young woman whose mission is her mother's dying wish - to bury her back home. On her death bed she sings of the troubles that befell her and her generation in an opening scene that demands attention as it establishes in ballad form the back story that brings us here. In telling the story of mother and daughter and their bond beyond death it becomes the repository of many similar testimonies and does bear the weight of that responsibility. How you react to Solier in the lead role will determine whether you respond emotionally or merely cerebrally. It is her journey to reestablish her life after the death and to overcome her condition that is beyond the medical, although it manifests itself medically, that you'll be preoccupied by.

Ultimately, the film represents the shame of a family and of a nation as both attempt to overcome their past by burying it. That is a theme that can be applied to conflicts across societies and throughout history told as the sun slowly rises in the the beautiful sadness of Solier's eyes. The story is told less through linear plot and more through the occurrence and recurrence of images that suggest the paintings of Frida Kahlo, another Latin American woman who spent her life overcoming a tragic beginning by a strength of will expressed in surreal but rooted visions.

Cinema review: 'Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans' directed by Werner Herzog, starring Nicolas Cage

2010-06-03T12:07:00.000-07:00

This good cop/bad cop movie is more reminiscent of David Lynch, whose involvement in the project is unspecified and apparent, down to the jive talking surrealists and their chameleon visions - and than any of his previous work. That said, Nicolas Cage is at his maddest and most affecting in the lead role and one can imagine Cage and Herzog in a creative partnership in the way the latter once enjoyed and endured with his best fiend, Klaus Kinski.

We join Cage as Terence McDonagh just after Hurricane Katrina when despite his worser nature he dives into the bilge to rescue a jailbird, injuring his spine in the process, thus initiating a drug addicted spiral he never really breaks out of but that gives the film its momentum. McDonagh is a man of many vices, addicted to gambling as well as painkillers and consorting with prostitutes and gangsters, playing ball with the law.

Eva Mendes is a great watch as the hooker with a heart, body and brain and Cage visibly enjoys slowly loosening his grip on the role that may well become a cult anti-hero, delivering increasingly crazed lines with brio and following a course dictated by the peculiar logic of his inner and outer circumstance. There's enough bodies strewn in his path to keep the hardboiled amused and although calling this a psychological drama would be claiming too much - or too little - it is a psychodrama of both the highest and lowest order.

Theatre: Beanfield by Shaun McCarthy directed by David Lockwood at Bike Shed Exeter and Tobacco Factory Bristol

2010-06-03T12:02:00.000-07:00

Beanfield

Written by Sean McCarthy
Directed by David Lockwood
Produced by the Particular Theatre Company
The Bike Shed Theatre, Exeter: 1st - 19th June 2010
The Tobacco Factory, Bristol: 24th Auigust- 4th September

It is 25 years since the Battle of the Beanfield, a confrontation between the police forces of several counties and a peace convoy of new age travellers on their way to Stonehenge to celebrate the summer solstice, a fourteenth free festival that would have established the event by right. It occurred at the high watermark of Thatcherism and for many symbolises her government's strategy: to create enemies without or within, demonise them with the assistance of a right-wing press and then defeat them by force of arms. However, unlike the Falklands War and the miners' strike, it seems to have faded in the collective memory, despite being the police operation that led to the largest number of arrests in British history - 1,600 officers took over 500 citizens into custody, filling holding cells all over England with men and women, their children taken into care. Years later, the justice system begrudgingly acknowledged their innocence and police guilt but by then, lives had been ruined and a way of life erased from the landscape.

Why this anniversary has been overlooked when our media is usually hungry for the nostalgia of recent history is partly because of the lack of documentary footage of the event. Photographers on the scene were few and what news footage was filmed was mysteriously deleted or edited. In our age of internet media what has survived has surfaced on youtube, and can be seen by anyone, but back then were were dependent on the news barons of Fleet Street and Broadcasting house. There was something almost medieval about the confrontation as the police systematically destroy the travellers' homes and beat them into submission. What few independent witnesses there were on site still talk of their shock that such force could be deployed at so much cost to deal with what were mainly the refugees of recession, rogues by necessity but hardly potential revolutionaries.

The challenge for writer, cast and director is how to give the event context and reduce it from the widescreen to a small stage, telling human stories to capture a historic event from multiple perspectives. Shaun McCarthy looks to Shakespeare for his inspiration. The prelude to the Battle takes place in the Forest of Arden of a Midummer Night's Dream while the Battle itself draws from the history plays for lessons in how to conjure up largescale confl;ict with a small cast and a few props on a few boards of stage.

Key to success or failure of the endeavour of the venture is Steamer, the narrator and central protagonist played with energy, conviction and insight by Ben Crispin. This is his first major role since qualifying at Exeter's Cygnet Theatre drama school; it won't be his last. It is Crispin's charisma and drive that gives the momentum drama as Steamer steps out of his own tragi-comedy of a love story and into those of others, still seeking to understand what happened years on. Writing this review weeks after seeing the production, Steamer still lives in my dreams while the other characters have faded into the background; give him a chance, he might just find his way into yours.

The first act is one of setup and explication. If you are of that time and place, it may seem laboured, but no doubt necessary to situate characters and audience. The roles established are convenient to the development of several themes of the play. Steamer's girlfriend Annie is herself the daughter of a news editor, taking a break out of what has otherwise been a cosseted life; seeking purpose, flirting with danger. Katie Villa is well cast to walk a sometimes meandering line between innocence and experience and it is her character and gives many in the audience a door from their life into that of a band of vagrants who were more often choosing the convoy over sink estates and urban squats than slumming it for fun, although there was plenty of fun to be had along the way.

Diane is a west country innocent picked up by chance en route and Georgie Rennolds who plays her combines naivety and nous in a persona that becomes more layered as the drama unravels until it his her experience and its telling that you trust more than any other. She also plays the female half of a Midlands couple due to take a trip through the West Country and again gives her character development that becomes insight, however simplified the implied conflict between working and non-working class is represented as being. Again, McCarthy takes from Shakespeare that combination of cartoon characterisation and plotlines that depend on coincidence for credence with a quality of language that enables the actors to transcend and subvert audience expectations.

The demands of the production mean all of the cast apart from Crispin have to play a variety of roles so the foot soldiers of the battle are in place when the action begins, whether police, council or convoy. Ben Simpson as Benny and as Eli Thorne as Lex are asked to represent the light and dark sides of both convoy and police and while these minor roles are more symbols than characters, they dodeliver their keynote speeches with gusto and bring enough energy to the stage in the battle scene that you feel you are seeing a telephoto view of a wideangle conflict. It is a credit to cast and David Lockwood's direction that the set piece scenes are conjured up by just five actors and a flexible set that is cunningly designed by Phil Wyatt to become any of the many settings the play demands while also saying something of a mobile life off odds and ends, its frammework and props something that could be constructed from the contents of any hardware store.

The second half of the play opens with the battle scene that is necessarily noisy and brutal but then takes us through the immediate aftermath and into the later eighties when bust has turned to boom and there is money to be made even by the more savvy of those like Steamer who were once left behind. In many ways, this is the most interesting part of the play. Leave travellers in their battered buses and you only see a segment of their lives because few except those born to the convoy began their lives on the road and, given the sequence of laws that were passed in the five years after the battle that the play relates like a magna carta of rights taken away, most have long abandoned the lifestyle or fled to southern europe where casual work is more available year round. Steamer has got off the bus but still has the light of life in his eyes while in others from the past he encounters by chance, it already seems to have died.

Veterans of the conflict - for this was just the largest of many battles that ended at Castlemorton in 1990, the last of the great free festivals when new age and rave cultures merged on common land for a week or two of fuck-you paryting - attended rehersals on a number of occasions but in the end it is writer and director who had to find a few stories among the many to make sense of what happened to a modern audience and say something worth saying today. In that, they largely succeed. Back then, I was flirting with the lifestyle myself, a weekend hippie and armchair anarchist hitching my way to free fesivals across southern England. But in just the same way as union laws were rewritten after Orgreave and Wapping, so the trend towards a progressive denial of civil liberties and ever-increasing surveillance began at the Beanfield. However confused resistance was in that movement, it wasn't futile although it was defeated.

As another young generation are dispossessed and see the life opportunities they thought they were born to evaporate, so a new movement will begin and this time it will be better organised, at once less visible and more effective. By looking back to Shakespeare, McCarthy reminds us that the English peasantry have a long history of rebellion. Any history play has to do more than describe a particular set of events if it is to survive. Yes, the play is one of archetypes playing out plot lines we've seen before in familiar ways but that is both its point and purpose. I have seen all of Particular Theatre's productions so far and rate this as the one most likely to have a deserved life of its own beyond the Bike Shed stage.

Poetry: Excite June Newsletter

2010-06-01T10:19:00.000-07:00

Firstly, welcome to all new stanza members, and a sunny morning one and all,

Details of poetry events in June follow below, with flyers attached, so please forward to interested parties.

Open mic night at Exeter Cathedral, 4th June, 8.30pm -10.30pm, a fundraiser for a charity which provides emergency accommodation for young people with nowhere else to go. Open mic spots available, contact Katie Moudry at katiemoudry AT hotmail.com

Otto Retro open mic, Exeter, 10th June, 7.30pm, £4/£3 concs on the door - Another night of funky junk with generous helpings of wine and nibbles and yes, poetry. Give me a call or drop me an email to book a slot.

Carrie Etter @ The Paragon Gallery, Exeter, 17th June, 7.30pm, £5 /£3 on the door. We're very lucky to have Carrie come down and visit us. Carrie is a senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. She has been widely published both in the US and UK, (Poetry Review, The New Republic, Stand, TLS, to hardly name a few). She'll be reading from both her pamphlet, The Son, from Oystercatcher Press and her first collection, The Tethers, from Seren, which the TLS hailed as 'one of the most ambitious and accomplished first collections in recent years.'
Not to be missed.

Open mic spaces available, but I warn thee now, they will go quickly...
Other interesting bits of news
Word of Mouth, A wee bit further out, but on the 5th June if you are in the Barnstable area there is a free afternoon of spoken word, poetry, performance and live music at Boston Tea Party, 1pm - 5pm.
The Poetry Society Stanza Competition is open now, the theme is 'Elsewhere', full rules below. If you are on the ExCite Poetry mailing list, i.e. received this email from stanza@rachelmccarthy.com you are eligible to enter.

http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/content/membership/stanzas/competition/2010rules/
I've been wittering in public about various things lately, which are now archived on the website (www.rachelmccarthy.com).
A look back over Carol Ann Duffy's first year as laureate:
http://www.rachelmccarthy.com/rachelmccarthy.com/One_going,_going,_gone.html
My Interview in Poetry News about what we do:
http://www.rachelmccarthy.com/rachelmccarthy.com/Poetry_News_Article.html
That's all for now folks, best
Rachel
--

Rachel McCarthy,

Poetry Society Representative for East Dev
email: stanza AT rachelmccarthy.com
website: http://www.rachelmccarthy.com/

Uncut Poets

The June event features guest poets
James Bell & Steve Spence
Please join us to say farewell to James who is retiring from his slot as co-host of Uncut, and also has a new collection to promote: Fishing for Beginners, published by Tall Lighthouse. Steve will read from his recently-published first collection, A Curious Shipwreck.

The event takes place on
Thursday 24 June, 7:30 pm, at
The Black Box
Media Centre
Exeter Phoenix
Gandy Street
Exeter
Box Office: 01392-667080

Tickets: £5 / £3 (concessions & open-mic readers)

Anyone wishing to book an open-mic slot may do so by calling James Bell on 07879-888319.

If you can't get hold of James, try me (Tony Frazer) on 07789-430485.

The next Uncut session will be on Thursday 29 July, our last session before the summer break, and will feature Lee Harwood as guest poet. Guests for the rest of the year are Kelvin Corcoran (September), Alice Kavounas (October) and Lawrence Sail (November).
Another date for your diaries: on 1 July, Uncut regulars Damian Furniss and Alasdair Paterson launch their new collections at the Devon and Exeter Institution, 7 The Close [i.e. on the Cathedral Green], Exeter EX1 1EZ. 7:30 for 8pm. Admission free.

The Language Club

Poetry in performance

7.30 – 10pm

Tickets £5 (£3 concessions)

Saturday 5 June

With guest poet Damian Furniss.Damian will be reading from his forthcoming book Chocolate Che. The poems in Chocolate Che were written in Cuba in the fiftieth year of the revolution; in India working with dying destitutes and recovering from tuberculosis; travelling up and down the spine of the Americas and into the heart of Europe on the trail of soldiers, artists and monks.

Shearsman Readings

Swedenborg Hall, Swedenborg House, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH. The entrance is through the portico on the right of the building shown above. There is no admission fee. Unless stated otherwise, all readings are hosted by Tony Frazer, publisher of Shearsman Books.
The next reading is as follows:

All events start at 7:30 pm.
Tuesday 7 June 2010

Damian Furniss & Martin Anderson

Exeter Poetry Festival

On Sunday 10 October, 3:00pm, Elisabeth Bletsoe, Damian Furniss and Jaime Robles read in a special Shearsman event at the first Exeter Poetry Festival, Exeter Central Library. Further details tbc, but, apart from the Shearsman reading, Jen Hadfield, Julia Copus and Greta Stoddart are all scheduled to read at the Festival. Follow news about the Festival here

Particular Theatre: June Newsletter

2010-06-01T10:06:00.000-07:00

June 2010 – Newsletter 7
Dear Particular Friend,
It’s the 1st of June, the 25th anniversary of the battle of the beanfield and the opening night of Beanfield, Particular Theatre Company’s new play written to commemorate this event.

Also coming up in June is our two week theatrical extravaganza; the Exeter Fringe festival which will bring to the Bike Shed Theatre 20 different performances to keep you busy for two weeks straight.
We hope to see you all at The Bike Shed Theatre enjoying the treats we have lined up for this most exciting of Junes…
David, Fin and Debs

BEANFIELD
Our cast and crew are ready for the lights to go up on our brand new production of Shaun McCarthy’s Beanfield. Opening tonight the show will be on at The Bike Shed Theatre until the 19th of June.
The battle of the beanfield took place 25 years ago to the day and saw a group of travellers being kept away from Stonehenge through police brutality. Beanfield tells the story of the event through the means of a beautifully scripted love story.

Veterans of the battle have been involved in this production from the start; from the writing of the play to the rehearsal room. This will give you a real and true story that will keep you on the edge of your seat.
Tickets for Beanfield are £10 (£5 Monday and concessions) and can be bought online http://www.bikeshedtheatre.co.uk/whats-on/2010/6/#diary.

EXETER FRINGE FESTIVAL

The first ever Exeter Fringe Festival will take place at The Bike Shed Theatre from the 23rd of June to the 3rd of July 2010.
Everyday from midday to midnight The Bike Shed Theatre will be hosting six consecutive shows for a total of 20 shows over the course of the two weeks. It’s going to be busy.
We have dance, we have theatre, musicals and stand up, whatever you fancy there will be something for everyone.
Tickets for all performances are £5 except for stand up which are £10. For further details on each show and performance times visit www.bikeshedtheatre.co.uk.

Theatre review: Miss Julie by No Cut Theatre at The Bike Shed Theatre, Exeter

2010-05-05T15:42:00.000-07:00

The Bike Shed Theatre is giving Exeter residents a chance to enjoy worthwhile productions and occasional cabaret in an intimate setting. Another Tuesday night, another empty house indicates we're still not taking advantage. I'm in danger of repeating myself, but any night spent in the presence of live actors will be more fulfilling than an evening in front of the TV, and at a tenner a ticket, the recession is no excuse.

The Particular Theatre Company have focused on new writing from the south-west region but The Bike Shed is also enjoying adaptations of modern and classic plays, and Miss Julie is a piece of theatre of historical importance, being August Strindberg's best known work of naturalist tragedy that nevertheless incorporates hints of his more innovative expressionist work.

But does a classic of late nineteenth century drama translate not just to the contemporary stage but a contemporary setting? That was the challenge adaptor and director Isabel Evans took on and that is the question the audience were left with. Yes and no is my answer, perhaps befitting the to and fro power struggle between man and woman, working and upper class that is at the heart of this drama. The themes of the original were prescient and key to the next fifty years of European history. Class struggle isn't over and sexual politics is present in all of our lives, but perhaps not in the upstairs downstairs world of Miss Julie.

There are still great houses with butlers and cooks of course, but the dynamic is different to Strindberg's era and the melodrama doesn't consistently speak to a contemporary audience. Which is not to say that the production, put together by a group of Cygnet Theatre graduates, is without merit. Lizzy Drive as Kristin the cook has a good go at portraying an Irish girl of faith and fatalism. Her suffering stimulates more empathy than the less likeable duo at the centre of the drama. Wesley Magee's performance as Jean is probably the most consistent of the trio, his accent more assured and his presence more convincingly current. Annette Emery as Miss Julie has charisma and she balances the femme fatale with the tragic little girl lost of the title role. Her Potteries accent seems to come and go but that is perhaps intentional, saying something of a daughter of new money trying on the authority of mistress of the house. Her absent father is a dominant presence despite never being seen on stage.

The fuse of love and lust could have led to more physical explosions on stage and however fitting the final scene may have been in Scandinavia the century before last, it doesn't ring true now but I hope this first night performance grows over its short run, and the audience grows with it. I'm sure we'll see some of the cast on the Exeter stage again and wish No Cut Theatre well in its venture.

Art Review: Anthony Frost and Terry Frosts at The Brook Gallery Budleigh Salterton

2010-05-05T14:59:00.000-07:00

Budleigh Salterton, one of Devon's more genteel seaside towns, is an unlikely setting for a gallery specialising in contemporary, quality and usually abstract prints, but The Brook Gallery has been operating for over a decade now, and has built up a clentele of collectors onsite and online.

The late Sir Terry Frost should need no introduction, being one of our country's most celebrated painters and printmakers. His son Anthony has made his own reputation, sharing his father's talent for form and colour, but finding his own palette and motifs. A third generation of Frosts has taken up the family trade, with Anthony's son Danny recently having a room to himself at Tate St Ives.

This back-to-back show of the elder Frosts' work gives us a chance to compare and contrast two innovative printmakers who between them mastered just about every technique available to post-war artists working in the medium. I missed Anthony's show, being in Morocco, but am familiar with his work and its evolution, with the chevrons and slashes in intense blues and oranges beginning to breakup to reflect the development of his work on canvas. He paints to music - The Fall, who he's created cover art for, Captain Beefheart, Dinosaur Junior, PJ Harvey - and the key to what he does is rhythm and vibration. I prefer his paintings on a scale, benefitting from the textures of stitched cloth and netting he applies the paint on, but some of his more recent prints are leaping off the paper with new vigour.

Terry Frost worked mainly in primary colours with distinctive forms - the abstracted semi-circles of rocking boats, an always pulsing sun, stripes of colour that reverberate in each other's company. I particularly like his pieces in red, black and white and have reproductions of several on my wall. Beginning his career as an artist as a prisoner of war working with wood and lino from the huts he was imprisoned in. He ended back in the West Penwith landscape he loved, remarkably productive in his later years, with a joie de vivre that is remembered by all who knew him and more than evident in his last creations.

I was fortunate enough that my visit that coincided with the launch of Dominic Kemp's 'Terry Frost Prints - A Catalogue Raisonne' that compiles Sir Terry's work in the medium chronologically and is both definitive and beautifully produced with an illuminating series of essays. He delivered two talks, the first on the techniques of the printmaker, using examples from the exhibition as illustrations. The second majored on the images he created to accompany a book of eleven poems by Federico Garcia Lorca, the great Andalusian poet and playwright who was executed in the Spanish Civil War.These are darker and more mysterious than his usual images, and as great a set of illustrations as have graced any work of poetry.

Film Review - Cemetery Junction written and directed by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant

2010-05-05T13:07:00.000-07:00

Typical first novels are coming of age tales set where the author grew up with a version of himself taking the lead. Most should never have been written, or else left in the drawer. But given Ricky Gervais has already created 'The Office', one of the greatest comedies ever, together with 'Extras', a clever take on how his life might have played out if the comedy of embarrassment in his masterpiece had been replaced by catchphrases and canned laughter, I had high hopes for his first venture onto celluloid as an auteur rather than bit-part Hollywood player. I've no problem with 'Cemetery Junction' being occasionally comic drama, rather than occasionally dramatic comedy. But I was expecting more than a mediocre Brit-flick buddy movie that is formula without the bang.

It starts with 'Saturday Night, Sunday Morning' and ends with 'The Graduate' and in between quotes from classic cinema but never really breaks out of the small screen it might have been made for. Sure, the seventies decor has the volume turned up and the soundtrack is well chosen, ending with a sequence choreographed to Led Zeppelin's 'The Rain Song' that almost makes you sit up and notice, but never matches the grandeur of the music, but it lacks characters you care about going on a journey that matters - the essence of drama.

The only truly affecting performances are played by the two most experienced actors on set: Ralph Fiennes as the boss of an insurance company who might have made it out of the terraces but still treats his spouse like a char lady and Emily Watson as that much put upon wife who finally faces up to him and enjoys a moment of quiet triumph that reverberates loudly because of all they have put into the portrayal of a marriage. Some of the other 'grown-up' roles are creditable but it's the roles of the three mates grow up together fighting and farting that the movie and I just didn't care about them individually or collectively. Only Felicity Jones as the sweetheart impressed, but although she had screen time, the characterisation gave her little more than a series of cameos to work with.

Meanwhile, Gervais is another version of himself with added grime and stubble while Merchant looms into shot for a couple of gags that are peripheral to the plot. It's not that this pair don't have a film in them, it's that 'Cemetery Junction' isn't it. It'll get no audience outside of these shores but is worth a Saturday night on the sofa with popcorn if you're nostalgic for 1973 and want an easy night in with tunes you can hum along to.

Particular Theatre Company @ The Bike Shed Theatre in Exeter - May Newsletter

2010-05-05T12:41:00.000-07:00

May 2010 – Newsletter 6

Dear Particular Friend,

Spring is bringing with it petals, sun, prime ministerial debates and a thrilling line-up of entertainment at the Bike Shed Theatre.

To add some joy to this Bank Holiday weekend we are having a three-day-wonder special offer which will end on Tuesday 3^rd of May, read on for more details.

We hope you have all been enjoying the sunshine and will be as excited as we are about what’s going to be hitting our stage over the coming month.

All the best,

David, Fin and Debs

MISS JULIE & CLOCKWORK

We have two very exciting theatre companies gracing our stage over the coming month;

No Cut Theatre Company will be performing an adaptation of Miss Julie by August Stringberg. This will be No Cut’s first production; the company formed whilst treading our Bike Shed boards for a short play in February 2010. Their aim is to breathe new life into classical text, making it relevant to today’s world.

The Theatre Alchemists will be are bringing us an adaptation of Philip Pullman’s short novel Clockwork. Formed in 2007 The Theatre Alchemists debuted with a rendition of The Princess Bride and have since created works that focus on story telling which will make both children and adults leave the theatre with a smile.

Miss Julie by August Stringberg at the Bike Shed Theatre from the 4^th to the 8^th of May, start 7.30pm.

As Midsummer Eve celebrations take place on a country estate, the landowners daughter Julie plays a dangerous game with her fathers manservant Jean. But is it a game she can win?
No Cut Theatre presents a powerful new version of August Strindberg's Miss Julie, which explores the themes of class, equality, power and sex.

Clockwork by Philip Pullman at the Bike Shed Theatre from the 11^th to the 22^nd of May, start 7.30pm.

Strange tales are told of the events in a little german town in winter - sinister strangers, devilish knights and clockwork hearts. But it's all just a story isn't it? But just like clockwork, once you've wound up a story and set it going, it will run to it's end, no matter where that leads...

With live music, puppetry projection and storytelling, The Theatre Alchemists bring Philip Pullman's much loved "Clockwork" to the stage. And now it's all wound up, we can begin...

BEANFIELD

Our next in house production has us all raring to go. Beanfield is a new play by Bristol playwright Shaun McCarthy and will be showing at the Bike Shed Theatre from the 1^st of June to the to the 19^th of June 2010. It will then be transferring to the Tobacco Factory in Bristol from the 24^th of August for a two week run.

Produced to coincide with the 25^th Anniversary of the Battle of Beanfield, this beautifully poetic play uses the battle as a backdrop to tell a compelling love story as well as reminding us of the horrific events that took place in the not so distant past.

Starring Ben Crispin, Katie Villa, Eli Thorne, Sam Morris and Georgie Reynolds, Beanfield will once again showcase the work of our top class production team. This is a Particular show that just can’t be missed!

BANK HOLIDAY OFFER

To give you something to look forward to when you get back into the office on Tuesday morning, we are having a half price sale on all our tickets over this Bank Holiday weekend.

Book your tickets before Tuesday for any of our shows and you will be able to plan your next month of theatrical entertainment for a mere £5 a ticket!

Poetry events in Exeter, May 2010

2010-05-05T12:38:00.000-07:00

Open Mic spots for Otto Retro on Thursday 13th May are now up for grabs, doors open 7.15pm for a 7.30pm start, £4/£3 conc, wine and nibbly-things available.

To book a slot call Rachel McCarthy on 07854598552 or reply to this email

Please forward the attached poster to any others who might be interested and...

Friday 7th May: Acoustic Cafe @ Nightchurch

in Aid of Christian Aid

On Friday May 7th at Exeter Cathedral, Nightchurch will once again host Christian Aid for a special evening of music, art and opportunities to find out more about the challenge to end poverty.

There will be an acoustic cafe so if you're a poet, a storyteller, or a musician and would like a 5 minute open mic slot email katiemoudry@hotmail.com

Wondermentalist: Taking The Mic

Wed 19 May, 8pm onwards FREE in the cafe bar, Phoenix Arts Centre, Gandy Street, Exeter

The-have-a-go-in-the-bar-show for performing poets, stand-ups, variety acts, singer songwriters and those audiences looking for free entertainment with bar snacks. Hosted by Liv Torc (The Bard of Exeter and winner of the South West Heat of the National Radio 4 Poetry Slam – 2009). With support from Ed Tudor Pole (Tenpole Tudor) 5 min slots available – please book a slot in advance by emailing livtorc@yahoo.com

Uncut Poets: Richard Berengarten (formerly Richard Burns)

Thu 27 May, 7.30pm, £5 (£3) Black Box at Phoenix Arts Centre, Gandy Street, Exeter

Bring a drink from the bar and an open ear to connect with Exeter’s premier year round poetry platform. Want to read? Call James Bell on 07879 888319.

Theatre review: 'Still' by Steve Lambert at The Bike Shed Theatre by the Particular Theatre Company 13th April - 1st May 2010

2010-04-26T12:11:00.000-07:00

We make it one of our missions on The Blah Blah Blah Show to support local theatre, especially where it is promoting new writing and/or innovative productions. The Express and Echo has featured several missives in its letter pages the last few days from theatre goers complaining that 'popular' theatre (by which they mean West End musicals, and established but 'safe' classics) is increasingly unavailable in the city, leading them to travel to Torbay, Plymouth or further afield. I put it to them that anyone who is a genuine lover of drama should make an effort to support the more interesting, innovative and intimate productions that are put on in the city, in the Bike Shed and elsewhere. They won't enjoy every aspect of what they find played out to them on stage - I don't either - but there is nothing like a professional show in a small space to provoke as well as entertain and their patronage may be supporting the future writer of a classic or an emerging major actor to develop their talent.

'Still' really is an intimate production, the stage shrunk to a corner of the pop-up auditorium, but designed by Phil Wyatt as a kind of Forest of Arden, the place of midsummer dreams and nightmares. The two acts are separated by a decade but otherwise involve the same couple, if a pair of characters who've only just met when we meet them can be so described. They are also separated by the mystery at the heart of the play - what happened here before, what happened here after, what is happening here now.

The dynamic of the production is wholly dependent on the projected personality of Jo, played by Rose Romain, another product of the E15 Acting School, whose female graduates seem to embody zestful energy. Her humour was a constant provocation. It is her presence that carries what might otherwise be a difficult piece, full of uncertainties I didn't find successfully resolved. It's been a week since I was in the audience and I still find myself thinking out the play which is a good sign. I'm still unsure whether my failure to work it through to resolution is a bad sign, or the its reason for being.

Mark Shorto as David has the more difficult role of an altogether more diffident man - his portrayal of awkwardness might come across as awkward acting. With just two actors on stage for the duration, a degree of empathy is required for both characters and even before the truths of who he is, what he is doing, what he has done are revealed I just couldn't understand what the two were doing together; why he had taken her to his secret place was obvious enough, why she had chosen him and gone along with it less so.

In the end, I'm not sure if there was enough on the page or the stage to deliver a fully satisfying night at the theatre. I left wondering if I'd seen a one-act play over-extended, which isn't to say that serious themes weren't being considered in Steve Lambert's writing or David Lockwood's direction.
Is it better to tell a lie or to live one? Is life about moments of magic or the passages of the ordinary that link them? Is life given away or taken? Why does a story begin and when does it end? I'm not sure if this play has found its way through those questions yet, but at least it is asking them. More rewarding than a night of songs from the West End musicals? I think so.

Exeter Polish Film Festival, Two Stories Exhibition

2010-04-26T11:30:00.000-07:00

Two Stories Exhibition

The Two Stories Exhibition uses photographic art to explore the lost history linking Poland and Britain.

It uncovers details that have been suppressed for years, highlighting the Soviet invasion of Eastern Poland during World War2.

It describes events that challenge our beliefs in what we were told took place; events that affect Poland to this day.

It is touring Devon galleries and exhibition spaces over the next twelve months.

April 19th to May 17th 2010 - Devon Records Office

Mobile form of exhibition
Devon Records Office, Great Moor House, Bittern Road, Exeter EX2 7NL
Tel: 01392 384253
OPENING TIMES
Monday to Friday: 10.00 a.m. to 6.00 p.m
The following Saturdays in 2010 9.30 a.m. to 12.30 p.m.
16 January; 20 February; 6 & 20 March; 17 April; 15 May; 5 & 19 June; 3 & 17 July; 7 & 21 August; 4 & 18 September; 2 & 16 October; 6 & 20 November; 4 & 18 December
Map to site

May 15th to May 29th 2010 - Okehampton Museum

Gallery form of exhibition
Okehampton Museum, 3 West Street Okehampton ,Devon , EX20 1HQ
Tel:01837 52295
OPENING TIMES
Monday 23rd March - until 12th December
Monday - Friday 10.15am to 4.30pm, last admission 4.00pm
Saturdays 10.15am to 3.30pm with last entry 3pm
Museum site

May 22nd to June 19th 2010 - Tavistock library

Mobile form of exhibition
Tavistock Library, The Quay, Plymouth Road, Tavistock, Devon PL19 8AB
Tel: 01822 612218
OPENING TIMES
Monday 9:00 - 7:00
(Closed until 10:30 on the 2nd Monday of each month for staff training)
Tuesday 9:00 - 5:00
Wednesday 9:00 - 5.00
Thursday 9:00 - 5:00
Friday 9:00 - 7:00
Saturday 9:30 - 4:00

June 22nd to July 18th 2010 - Phoenix Centre

Gallery form of exhibition
Phoenix Centre, Gandy Street , Exeter, Devon EX4 3LS
Tel: 01392 667080
OPENING TIMES MON - SAT: 10am-5pm SUN: 11.30am-5pm. Entry is Free.
Map

June 22nd to July 18th 2010 - St Sidwell's Centre

Mobile form of exhibition
St Sidwell's Centre, Sidwell Street, Exeter, Devon EX4 6 NN
Tel: 01392 666222
Site

Exeter Polish Film Festival

The Exeter Polish Film Festiwal, a satellite event of Kinoteka Polish Film Festiwal, the flagship project of the Polish Cultural Institute, is a rare opportunity to see some of the best Polish movies, illuminating documentaries and animations. Discover the ‘Magical Worlds of Polish Animation’ and find inspiration at the Polish Film Festiwal Exhibition, featuring film posters designed by artists of the Polish School of Poster Design. Jazz fans cannot miss ‘Haunting Jazz Scores’ night with the unforgettable movie & jazz duo of Polański and Komeda, while those wanting to learn more about Polish cinema, are welcome to join us at the Exeter Central Library Film Club.

29 April -

Mother Joan of the Angels /
Matka Joanna od Aniołów

5 May -

Jasminum

5 May -

Land of Promise / Ziemia Obiecana

7 May -

Sexmission / Seksmisja

12 May -

Time to Die / Pora Umierać

12 May -

The Reverse / Rewers

14 May -

The Debt / Dług

Cinema Review: 'The Ghost' directed by Roman Polanski

2010-04-25T11:35:00.000-07:00

With its script based on a Robert Harris novel, I wasn't expecting any more than a join-the-dots political thriller plot, and that's what I got, although hoped for more nous in its construction and characterisation. But with Roman Polanski directing what may turn out to be his last movie, I was at least expecting a piece of quality film making, and that wasn't delivered either. True, Polanski hasn't consistently maintained the quality of his early films since his exile from America, but for every mundane production ('Oliver Twist', say) there has been a work as compelling as 'The Pianist'.

We know why Harris chose to create an alternative reality in which Tony Blair (or Adam Lang, if you must) gets his comeuppance - he was one of those who bankrolled the New Labour project in its early years until the disenchantment of the second Gulf War. But I'm unsure why Polanski decided to commit it to celluloid. Perhaps after taking up the challenge of recreating Victorian London and World War Two Warsaw, the appeal of a script ostensibly taking on big contemporary events (to say 'ideas' would be pushing it) able to be recreated on relatively small scale sets (most of the action is set in and around the former prime minister's Martha's Vineyard hideaway) was too much for him to resist, or perhaps he had his own Iraq War revenge fantasy to play out. Probably, it was a way of compensating for the collapse of his and Harris's 'Pompeii' project, once projected to have been the most expensive European film ever made, now likely to never cast light onto screen.

'The Ghost' might have worked, but is let down by both its central performances and direction. Pierce Brosnan plays Lang, but you can't shake off the suggestion this is really James Bondd oing a bad Tony Blair impression. He does his usual unshaken and rarely stirred brand of smooth but contaminates the cocktail with the acting equivalent of an unnecessary olive and mini umbrella. He's trying to channel a hollow but charming politician; what gets in the way is a charming but hollow actor. Ewan McGregor as the unnamed ghostwriter is little better. As Polanski's substitute for Nicolas Cage, he perhaps had little time to prepare. Or maybe he was told to do his worst take on Jude Law, which he throws the whole barrow boy act at. At least he gets to bed Cherie, played by Olivia Williams, who brings some complexity to her part as the power behind the ultimate throne. Kim Cattarall, meanwhile, plays a capable Miss Moneypenny and Tom Wilkinson brings the dark menace of the academic-military-industrial complex to a more sophisticated part than the average Bond.

In the end, its Polanski's failure to engage with the camera that transforms what might have been an intelligent romp into such a dull affair. The windswept island lair of Lang/Blair is too small a stage somehow to summon up the forces of global darkness. London is played by Berlin, and has a very minor role. Until the last two minutes, there's not a shot worth remembering. Then come two in a row before the curtain comes down that might just have had the little maestro leaping out of bed in the middle of the night. But by then, you'll probably have vacated the auditorium.

Poetry: Les Murray, Damian Furniss, Phil Bowen and more at The St Ives Literature Festival May 1st - 8th 2010

2010-04-18T08:35:00.000-07:00

Yes, dear reader that is your host looking unusually bearded and brown. In unashamed acts of self-publicity, I'll be using The Blah Blah Blah Show's blog to publicise events around the launch of my new book 'Chocolate Che' starting on Friday 7th May 2010 at 8.30pm in St Ives Arts Club in a double bill with Phil Bowen. What better way to escape the post-election blues (or yellows, or reds - we abide by Ofcom guidance here) than a weekend in the westernmost tip of Cornwall. The St Ives Literature festival is curated and hosted by Bob Devereux, spans the whole week and ends with an appearance by Les Murray on Saturday 8th. Details of both events below.

Damian Furniss and Phil Bowen - Friday 7th May - 8.30 pm - St Ives Arts Club - £6.00

DAMIAN FURNISS reads from his new book CHOCOLATE CHE (Shearsman). The poems in Chocolate Che were written in Cuba in the fiftieth year of the revolution; in India working with dying destitutes and recovering from tuberculosis; travelling up and down the spine of the Americas and into the heart of Europe on the trail of soldiers, artists and monks.Damian Furniss works images into narratives that are both darkly humorous and strangely moving. Using forms as varied as their subjects, with characteristic verbal intensity and a probing wit, he returns to the fixations of his youth in wry but reflective maturity. Along the way, he encounters the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa; visits the houses of Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí, only to find no one's at home; and collects the stubs of cigars that might once have been smoked by Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, but probably weren't.

Praise for his chapbook, The Duchess of Kalighat, several poems from which are included in this, his first full collection:
'Furniss explores India in many varied and astonishing images . . . no poet of promise but a poet of arrival.'- Derrick Woolf, Poetry Quarterly Review.
'The fire in the poetry roars. In this book the subject is hot and so is the language.' - Tim Allen, Terrible Work.
'This has a vitality all of its own.' - Brian Hinton, Tears in the Fence.
'Has strong convictions and a clearly defined sense of purpose. These are moving, transforming poems.' - Emma Neale, Scratch.

By popular demand PHIL BOWEN reads ALL THAT STUFF.
Phil Bowen was born in Liverpool in 1949. His collections of poetry include:
The Professor’s Boots (Westwords) 1994, Variety”s Hammer (Stride) 1997, selected for the Forward Book of Poetry-1998, and Starfly published by Stride in 2004. He has also edited two anthologies Jewels and Binoculars (in which 50 poets celebrate Bob Dylan), and Things We Said Today (Poetry about the Beatles) one biography A Gallery To Play To (The story of the Mersey Poets) reprinted by Liverpool University Press 2008 and Nowhere’s Far (collected poetry published by Salt 2009)
All That Stuff is a twenty minute poem.
'The Wasteland of the Twentieth Century' - Dave Wooley (Dylan Thomas Centre).
'A real tour de force' – Roger McGough.
'Amazing ……Quite incredible' – Mel Scaffold (Apples and Snakes).
'A work of genius' – John Cooper Clarke.

Les Murray - Saturday 8th May - 8.00 pm - St Ives Society Of Artists Crypt Gallery - £10.00

Australia's leading poet and one of the greatest contemporary poets writing in English. His work has been published in ten languages. Les Murray has won many literary awards, including the Grace Leven Prize (1980 and 1990), the Petrarch Prize (1995), and the prestigious TS Eliot Award (1996). In 1999 he was awarded the Queens Gold Medal for Poetry on the recommendation of Ted Hughes. He will be visiting St Ives as part of a UK tour and will be reading a selection of his work. For more information and a bibliography visit his website: www.lesmurray.org

Theatre: Particular Theatre Company - April Newsletter

2010-04-18T08:23:00.000-07:00

I've just seen Particular's production of 'Still' and will write a review as soon as time allows. Meanwhile, the programme at The Bike Shed gets ever more interesting and deserves tour attention. I was disappointed to be one of only half-a-dozen in the audience on Friday night. If Exeter can't do better than that. we don't deserve a venue that is combining new writing with classics not often produced in the provinces, and mixing in evenings of jazz, poetry and cabaret. With tickets at a tenner or less and a bar that serves drinks that can be taken into the auditorium, any local resident that claims a love of theatre should be able to visit once or twice a month, especially with the Northcott probably closing, the Phoenix increasingly focusing on music and the Barnfield tending towards more populist fare. You won't necessarily like every show you see, but if you persevere, you'll have some memorable nights that only such an intimate space can provide.

April 2010 – Newsletter 5

Dear Particular Friend,

Another busy month has gone by and we are now preparing to open the Bike Shed doors for our production of Still. Cast and crew have been busy at work on what promises to be another sterling production.

The Bike Shed Theatre has continued to fill its stage with a variety of performances from live music, to poetry, dance and theatre. Our new venue is proving to be a welcome addition to Exeter’s cultural scene.

We hope to see you all at the show over the next few weeks!

David, Fin and Debs

STILL – TICKETS ON SALE NOW

The heat of a summer night. The cool of a meandering river. A childhood secret that holds the memory of young love. When a married father picks up a seductive hitch-hiker and takes her to his boyhood hiding place, the question is – has he been waiting for her all his life, or she for him? Still is a story of desire and betrayal, love and redemption.

Still, by Bristol playwright Steve Lambert, will be showing at The Bike Shed Theatre from the 13^th of April to the 1^st of May, Tuesday to Saturday. Tickets are currently on sale on the Bike Shed Theatre website; http://www.bikeshedtheatre.co.uk/diary/2010/4/.

Tickets cost £10 with a special Tuesday price of £5.

CAST

Rose Romain

Rose trained at E-15 Acting school, London(graduated 2005) Winning the Lillian Bayliss Award for most promising second year drama school student.

Recent Theatre includes: ‘Turf’ (The Bush Theatre, London) ‘Stovepipe’ National Theatre and The Bush);’Saved and other stories’(The Theatre Royal Haymarket) ‘The Point’ (Queens Theatre, Hornchurch)‘The Duchess of Malfi’(The White Bear, London) A Midsummers night Dream (White Horse Theatre Germany) Film, TV and Comms include: Daggenham Girls( British Film Council) Diet Coke,(Ridley Scott Films)

Rose grew up in the West Country and is delighted to be returning to the stage in Exeter where her journey as an actor began. She is continually informed by new learning and the creative interpretation that is born from unfamiliar challenges.

Mark Shorto

Mark hails from Jersey and trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. He lives in Exeter and has been a member of Crediton Actors Workshop for many years. His work in the South West includes Orchard Theatre, Theatre Royal Plymoth, Imule Theatre and Exstream Theatre. An advocate of lifelong learning, he recently gained a degree in English with Drama from the University of Exeter. He sometimes directs community and youth theatre, most recently The Burial at Thebes for the Farringdon Society of Arts in 2008. In the same year he made a brief appearance in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. Mark has recently appeared at the Bike Shed Theatre in the Jackdaw Theatre double bill, and previously worked with Particular in the rehearsed readings of The Derelicts and Matthew's Splinter.

THE BIKE SHED THEATRE – NEW WEBSITE

The Bike Shed Theatre website is now up and running at www.bikeshedtheatre.co.uk. Here you can find the programme for the coming months as well as buying your tickets online for all our upcoming events.

Morocco Visit Revisted

2010-04-18T08:13:00.000-07:00

Since my last post I've spent some time in Morocco while Rachel McCarthy flew the April Blah Blah Blah Show solo. What she featured and who she played, you're more likely to know than me, but Harry Guest was her guest.

Many of those who visit Morocco confine themselves to one or two of Marrakech, Fes, Tangier, Essaouira and Agadir but the grandeur of the country's klandscape is most apparent if you can get up and over the High Atlas and experience the Sahara as it begins its journey from scrub into dunes - 52 days to Timbucktoo.

My trip was more concerned with culture than Culture but Morocco is a natural film set and Ouarzazate has become Ouallywood with two major studios on the outskirts of town and landscape that can double as anywhere from Arizona to Israel all around.

Here is a list of foreign movies filmed in Morocco. On the road, we came across an American garage that was presumably a set for The Hills Have Eyes. Ait Benhaddou is a ksar or fortified village that is both a world heritage site and the star of films such as Gladiator and The Sheltering Sky, the definitive movie for those who wish to see the Kingdom of Morocco as it begins in Tangier and fades into the southern desert, also shot at the Oulad Adbehalim Ksar among other locations. Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and starring John Malkovitch and Timothy Spall, this is especially recommended to admirers of Debra Winger.

The Sheltering Sky is one of the several novels of Paul Bowles set in Morocco and taken collectively they express that fusion of alienation and fascination that is typical of the occidental in the orient, deconstructed by Edward Said in his book Orientalism.

Paul Bowles was the not entirely welcoming host and mentor to the Beats in Tangier and while most of them were just passing through, leaving a trail of kif smoke and boy flesh behind them, Morocco is essential to the work of William Burroughs, his Interzone being modelled on Tangier and Marrakech and its surrounds bleeding into the red lands of his later work. Read Naked Lunch and weep or try Tangier: City of a Dream for a comprehensive introduction to the literature produced there during its international period.

For those who prefer a lighter but no less intelligent read, try the travel books of Tahir Shah set in Casablanca. The Caliph's House describes he and his family's first year buying and renovating a riad in the city, confronting a depth of cultural difference that is only hinted at in surface dealings with a friendly and humourous people. In Arabian Nights continues the narrative and branches out in journeys to find the storytellers of Morocco so beloved of his father and recount their tales.

Naturally, that book ends in Place Djemaa el-Fna, the main square of Marrakech, where storytellers, clowns and acrobats still ply their trade. There over Easter weekend with the city occupied by tourists from all nations, it was the snake charmers, monkey boys and gnawa musicians that seemed to dominate, more international and photogenic entertainments maybe, but the mystery of Marrakech is being Disneyfied, or so it seems until the sun sets and the smoke of a hundred wood grills fills the air with the aroma of heart and tongue. In the dark, the medievalness of the souks overwhelms their modernity and you are someone else, somewhere else again.

Morocco was fertile territory for my writing and I hope to begin to publish and perform some of the pieces I began there in the near future. I spent a happy last day at Cafe du Livre in the French colonial quarter, reached through the entrance to Burrough's Marrakech hotel. For good food and drink, a fine selection of new and secondhand books, free wifi internet and place of calm to collect your thoughts, I recommend it.

Theatre: 'Closer' at the Barnfield Theatre Exeter 9th - 20th March 2010 (encore)

2010-03-20T07:21:00.000-07:00

My opinions on cinema are of no consequence to international film makers. If I write a feature on an exhibition at the Tate it is unlikely to come to the attention of Nick Serota. But write a review of an Exeter theatre production and it is likely to be read - and sometimes responded to - by those involved. Local papers usually give a show publicity, but rarely publish a review, and if they do it is most often perfunctory. The theatre press is London based and don't regularly give space to small-scale provincial productions, whatever their merit. So I'm conscious that what I say on The Blah Blah Blah Show - radio or blog - has a dual function: to give critical feedback while promoting and encouraging local artists and their work, especially at a time when funding is harder to come by and venues are closing.

When I reviewed 'Closer' on its opening night at the Barnfield, it was evident that the Random Acts production had potential, but that potential had yet to be fully realised. A small audience generated little atmosphere. Technical problems meant a late start . Not ideal circumstances for a debut. So when the company contacted me and offered me a free ticket to a show later in the run, I took them up on it. Seeing a film twice gives fresh perspective, but it is the same film. Giving a book a second read is like returning to an old friend: it hasn't changed, you have. But a play can shift gears night on night and I was curious to see how the production had evolved three-quarters way into its run.

It was worthwhile doing so. A full-house created a buzz that wasn't there 10 days earlier and laughter is infectious. There was more connection, more tension and more emotion in the performances of the cast. A changed vantage point meant a different view, one of the pleasures of theatre in the round in a studio space. It was good to see that the Director Adam Brummitt was still intently involved in proceedings, making notes for further fine-tuning. The crew were also clearly still focused on the production, not just their tasks, still responding to the humour, revelling in its darkness.

All the individual performances had developed, in particular those of Vicki-Jo Eva, who seemed to have inhabited Anna when previously she was still seeking her out, and Tim Metcalf-Wood, whose portrayal had gained both depth and nuance. Emma Vickery's Alice is the role that holds the drama together, and she has the ability to switch from flirtatious to intense while maintaining the mystery the part demands. If Sebastian Pope's sometimes sandwiches cheese and ham, he surprised on occasions with moments that showed real feeling, and the chemistry between the cast was much stronger, enough to believe that these were relationships being played out, not just played.

My appreciation of Patrick Marber's play is undiminished and, on this occasion, Random Acts did it justice. I wouldn't be surprised if the performance reaches an even higher pitch in tonight's finale. If they are reading, we'd be happy to have them on our radio show in advance of a future production.

Theatre: 'Closer' at the Barnfield Theatre Exeter 9th - 20th March 2010

2010-03-14T14:36:00.000-07:00

'Closer' by Patrick Marber is one of the classic plays of the 1990s. Since 1997 it's been translated into many languages and played all over the world. In 2004 it was adapted by the playwright as a film directed by Mike Nichols and starring Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Natalie Portman and Clive Owen who also played the part of Dan in it's Royal National Theatre debut.

'Random Acts Theatre' shares several of its backroom staff and backers with 'The Particular Theatre Company' but unlike the latter's policy of featuring regional writers, they've chosen to perform a play that will be familiar in one form or another to many of the audience. That is a challenge for both cast and spectator, as many will find it difficult to get past the movie adaptation and allow the characters space to evolve.

At one point, Sebastian Pope seems to channel the voice of Clive Owen in what is otherwise a creditable performance as a Doctor who has taken the hypocritic - rather than Hippocratic - oath. Tim Metcalf-Wood blends louche with pathos as Dan the obituary writer, but seems an unlikely match for Emma Vickery's Alice who takes on the part with gamine gusto, down to the lapdancing scenes. Vicki-Jo Eva is a quiet Anna and only really comes alive in her double-header with her female counterpart. Indeed, the male-on-male and female-on-female scenes are the most compelling in a play that depends on four-way chemistry in every combination to be successful. The frisson between the male and female characters needs to develop from the first night performance I attended if the run is to be considered a complete success.

The staging owes more to the original theatre productions, being a minimalist set that successfully adapts to a new setting for every scene - hospital waiting room, photographer's studio, art gallery, internet chat room, aquarium, apartments, art gallery, hotel room etc - and the crew of Claudia Cisneros, Emily Lake and Natasza Kuler have done a good job in design and management in a production not without technical complexity. The studio room of the Barnfield Theatre allows for the performance to be done in the round, with audience never more than four rows from the stage, and this intimacy is used by Adam Brummitt to explore the mores of contemporary relationships in their every aspect, surely the reason why the play has become both notorious and lauded over the last decade.

I hope the production develops and grows over its run. It's a difficult play to get right first time, so dependent is it on the relationships between the actors convincing the audience these are characters who at various points in the arc of the play are meeting for the first time, falling in love, falling out of love, playing out rivalries, coming to realisations about themselves. I hope the audience grows too, because on the first night - a Monday - I felt like a voyeur, being almost alone.

Poetry: performances from 'Chocolate Che' by Damian Furniss filmed by Mark Barton

2010-03-14T11:26:00.000-07:00

On Saturday February 27th 2010 I made a film with Mark Barton, a TV production MA student at University College, Falmouth.

Watching yourself never makes for comfortable viewing but with festivals demanding video footage before making a booking, it had to be done.

With six hours to make six minutes of footage, time was short. With most of the effort going into the editing, we worked with the first good take and with my mental capacity limited to learning a stanza or two at a time spliced shots using different angles, lighting effects, costumery and photographs to produce the finished piece.

It features performances of 'Chocolate Che', 'Darshan with Dalai Lama', 'Bacon Dust' and 'Che's Hands' from the book 'Chocolate Che' more details of which can be found by following the links in the lefthand margin of this page.

'Chocolate Che' by Damian Furniss is published by Shearsman Books on April 2nd 2010.

youtube link

Poetry: Exeter Poetry Festival 7th to 10th October 2010

2010-03-14T06:49:00.000-07:00

While I'm updating, it looks like Exeter Poetry Festival will go ahead 7 - 10 October 2010 so keep an eye on its blog for updates.

Already confirmed are Ronald Tamplin, Jen Hadfield, Julia Copus and Greta Stoddart...

Liv Torc will be poet in residence. Anyone who lives in Exeter and is half awake will have come across the Wondermentalist Bard in performance or promoting the spoken word.

You can catch her at the Phoenix Arts Centre every third Wednesday of the month hosting an open mic night.

My co-host Rachel McCarthy is also involved and will be deploying the energies that have made Excite the most active Poetry Society Stanza.

She hosts the open mic sessions at Otto Retro every second Thursday.

Tony Frazer, editor of Shearsman Books, is also assisting in curating the festival.

He co-hosts Uncut Poets at the Black Box in Exeter's Phoenix Centre every fourth Thursday which features open mic slots and a monthly guest poet.

So that's three open mic poetry shows every month, not counting the regular book launches and other performances. When it comes to the arts in general, Exeter may sometimes seem comatose, but the poetry scene is alive and kicking.

Come and join us in October! We're hoping for a festival special of The Blah Blah Blah Show on October 3rd to launch the event.

Theatre: March Newsletter from the Particular Theatre Company based at The Bikeshed Theatre, Exeter

2010-03-14T06:14:00.000-07:00

We make it our mission at The Blah Blah Blah Show to support Exeter's theatre and poetry scene. I've just received the March Newsletter from the Particular Theatre Company based at The Bikeshed Theatre, Exeter, and reproduce it here in full...

March 2010 – Newsletter 4

Dear Particular Friend,

One month has gone by since our last newsletter and much has changed in the particular world.

The Distance is now over and we hope that many of you had a chance to enjoy this production. The end of The Distance however, has not marked the end of The Bike Shed Theatre; this is now a new performance space for the city of Exeter to enjoy and we will be packing it full of exciting shows for the foreseeable future. Read on for more details.

We hope you are all enjoying the arrival of spring, see you at The Bike Shed Theatre!

David, Fin and Debs

THE DISTANCE

The Distance by Bournemouth playwright Craig Norman ran at The Bike Shed Theatre from the 8^th to the 27^th of February. Alison Collinge played the role of Alex, a young mother dealing with the pressures of a changing world and her own mental illness.

I had the pleasure of playing the, to put it mildly, dramatic character of Alex in The Distance.

I was so ready to get my teeth into something and Alex was just that. My worries were of making her one dimensional and stereotypically mad, but I soon realised if I played her ‘mad’ I could go horribly wrong! I had to find her sanity and show elements of why Darby married her in the first place. Finding the depth and layers to her and exploring relationships between the other characters was a task that lasted throughout and up to the very last performance. This was thanks to the great cast and director for keeping me on my toes. It always amazes me how different one show can be to the next, a slight inclination of a line from one character which provokes a different reaction can change the feel of a scene completely.

The Bike Shed Theatre is such a great find, an intimate but hugely versatile space if a little cold at times. You could always find me gravitating toward one of their little heaters!

I’m so pleased to have worked with this young, dynamic and friendly company and although my part was dark, angst ridden and distressed, I can safely say my experience wasn’t! A good balance of hard work and some great laughs, a perfect combination!

THE BIKE SHED THEATRE

. The Bike Shed Theatre will be open until the end of June and, with your support we hope to continue further and become a permanent fixture to Exeter’s entertainment scene.

The Bike Shed Theatre will be programming original theatre, music, dance and much more with a particular focus on local performers.

Upcoming productions at the Bike Shed Theatre include:

Wednesday 10^th of March: MERGE – Contemporary dance platform. 7pm. Free.

Friday 12^th and Saturday 13^th of March: Bristol Experimental Theatre Company – THE LONG LINE OF BUREAUCRACY. 8pm [£7 (5)]

Thursday 18^th and Friday 19^th of March: Theatre with Teeth – SPAM DADDY? 8pm [£5 (3)]

Saturday 20^th of March – AvantRural presents the VEGGIE BOX. Details TBC.

Thursday 25^th to Saturday 27^th of March: Jackdaw Theatre Company – double bill. Harold Pinter’s A SLIGHT ACHE and UPPISCHBAUM & THE BARD.

On Sundays The Bike Shed Theatre will be the host to Cabaret Theatrique a free afternoon of varied entertainment.

For further listings check out our website on www.bikeshedtheatre.co.uk or join our Facebook group.

STILL

The heat of a summer night. The cool of a treacherous river. A secret place that has witnessed young love, lust and death. When a married father picks up a seductive hitch-hiker and takes her to his boyhood hiding place, the question is – has he been waiting for her all his life, or she for him? Still is a story of desire and betrayal, hate and desecration, love and redemption.

Still by Steve Lambert will be Particular Theatre Company’s next production and will be showing at The Bike Shed Theatre from the 12^th of April to the 1^st of May.

Steve Lambert’s recent productions include Showing the Monster (Theatre West, Alma Tavern, Bristol) and Aftercare (ScenePool, Camden People’s Theatre, London). He is also a member of Heads and Tales, a Bristol-based story-telling group. Steve's short plays The Viewing and The Search were produced by Particular Theatre Company in their 6/10 slots in September 2009.Tickets for Still will be on sale from the end of this week.

Cinema: Review of 'The Last Station'

2010-03-14T06:09:00.000-07:00

I was hoping to begin this review with a celebration of Helen Mirren's Oscar winning performance as Countess Sofya Tolstaya in 'The Last Station'. The Hollywood machine being what it is, I can't even give you the consolation that Carey Mulligan picked up the award for her charming lead in 'An Education'. Instead, the Hollywood Machine gave us Sandra Bullock who has appeared in forty odd movies, none of which I've seen, and I catch a film most weeks, sometimes two. Make of that what you will.

Instead, I'll start by telling you that Helen Mirren was born Ilyena Vasilievna Mironov, the granddaughter of a Russian tsarist nobleman. So for those of you who consider the Dame quintessentially English, think again - blue vodka runs through her veins. Her father changed his name to Basil and was a cab driver, driving test examiner and civil servant in the Ministry of Transport and her mother was the thirteenth daughter of a West Ham butcher, so her cockney credentials are also strong.

As is her performance in this depiction of Leo Tolstoy's last year, told through the eyes of his male secretary played by James McAvoy who made 'The Last King of Scotland' but despite screen time, is peripheral here when up against Mirren, whose performance is operatic in scope and emotion - and Christopher Plummer - 90% Lear, 10% Fool as Tolstoy himself. Next to the grand passion of these two old timers, the love of the young is an occasional distraction.

The birch woods and long grass of a Russian summer make a fine setting for the drama whose three acts focus on a Tolstoyan commune, the family estate and the station where he dies on the way from there to who knows where, escaping his wife and the conflict at the heart of the movie - the obligations of family, property and marriage against those of community, principle and fraternity. Tolstoy wants to leave the royalties from his books to his anarchist, christian, pacifist, communitarian movement. His wife wants it for herself and family, to keep them in the lifestyle to which she's like to become accustomed, and given she hand wrote 'War and Peace' six times and bore the old goat thirteen children, you might say she deserved a say in the matter.

Stay for the credits to catch snippets of Tolstoy himself filmed in 1910 and think for a few moments on what a long hundred years it's been, for since we've had two world wars, the rise and fall of Soviet communism, and the slow decline of the novel since it reached its height around the turn of the century.

Cinema: Review of 'Fresa y Chocolate' or 'Strawberry and Chocolate'

2010-03-14T05:38:00.000-07:00

Generally, the only event to lure the Blah Blah Blah crew into the Black Box at Exeter's Phoenix Arts Centre is the monthly Uncut Poets event, but the chance to see one of my favourite Cuban films - 'Fresa y Chocolate' or 'Strawberry and Chocolate' - on a biggish screen was too much to resist, even on a Monday night.

Originally released in 1994 during Cuba's 'special period' - the years following the end of the Soviet Union and Eastern European communism - the story takes place in Havana in 1979, a time when the revolutionary spirit was still strong in Cuba twenty years on, but repression of homosexuals and other perceived dissidents was also at its height.

I don't have time today to do the film justice. Follow the links here and above to find more detailed discussion. It has elements of an odd couple or buddy movie, and works at that level as a moving comedy - but is of particular interest to anyone interested in Cuban politics and society. The very fact it was made and tolerated by a regime previously not averse to censorship was notable in itself, the open playing confrontation of differing world views (the homosexual aesthete versus the heterosexual doctrinaire communist) significant in surfacing debate that had previously been kept underground.

The achievements and compromises of Cuban society under a communist regime are also all present - the quality of the health service and education system versus the rationing of and hustling for consumer goods - and correct, but the movie is neither polemic nor documentary and works well as a cookie comedy with some fine performances, especially by Jorge Perugorria who plays the camp but charismatic Diego. For visitors to Cuba, it also features some landmarks including the Coppelia ice cream parlour which is open to all comers and a good place to chat to Habaneros in a relaxed atmosphere. More exlusively, Paladar Guarida - the apartment where much of the film was shot - is now a privately restaurant, but book ahead as it's a real celeb hangout and very popular with the diplomatic community.

The event was organised by Jane Yates who is testing the Exeter waters to gauge interest in setting up a branch of the Cuban Solidarity Campaign. She plans further Cuban film evenings so keep an eye on the Phoenix website and this blog.

Music: March show playlist

2010-03-14T05:02:00.000-07:00

With March 7th 2010 being International Women's Day eve and celebrations in the Phoenix scheduled for the afternoon and evening, I focused my selection on female artists. Naturally, this drew complaints from our listener, who especially objected to the 'warbling' of Joan Baez. I have sympathy - I can't listen to an entire Baez album without yowling back like a tom cat - but Baez also provided one of the finest nights in my concert going life at the Paradiso in Amsterdam and the recent documentary film of her life and work is well worth a viewing. Onto the playlist, or what I can remember of it...

1. 'Redemption Day' by Johnny Cash

We began our first show with a late Johnny Cash cut and with the release of his posthumous album 'American VI: Ain't No Grave' there was no better way in which to start this one - written by Sheryl Crow, this is now a Johnny Cash song, just like all the other American recordings he made his own during the last prolific phase of his career. I own all eleven CDs recorded during the last decade of his life and suggest you should too.

2. 'Sensual World' by Kate Bush

Our introduction to the sensual world of Ann Gray's poetry - one of Devon's great female eccentrics. That's Kate Bush who lives in the South Hams near Start Point - Ann Gray is one of Cornwall's great female eccentrics.

3. 'Lady Midnight' by Leonard Cohen

Ann was concerned her first choice might be too miserable. In Furniss Towers, we consider early Cohen party music.

4. 'Clothes Line Saga' by Suzy and Maggie Roche

It being Women's Day eve and all, I forgot to play any Bob Dylan. This is especially uncharacteristic as Dylan's European tour plans are just coming through and with his only UK date being the Hop Farm Festival in Kent, men of a certain age and disposition are considering another jaunt to the continent. Ann's choice was a Dylan cover by the Roche sisters which I thought I hadn't heard before until I checked the archive and found it amongst my hoard of covers. It ain't on youtube though, so I've linked to the Genuine Basement Tapes version.

5. 'Brown Eyed Handsome Man' by Buddy Holly

Apparently not inspired by her genial host but her own father telling her she'd never marry a brown eyed boy, this was Ann's next selection. Who was at Buddy Holly's Duluth concert three days before he died on February 3rd 1959? Bob Dylan.

6. 'To Ohio' by The Low Anthem

Ann and I share the view that The Low Anthem's debut was the best album of last year. But Ann goes one better - she has seen them live. They are playing The End of the Road Festival at Larmer Tree Gardens in September. See you there?

7. 'Hasta Siempre' by Sexteto Kamaraco

That Che Guevara song I've played before in a different version. I saw this band on the roof terrace of the Hotel Inglaterra. The link is to the Buena Vista Social Club version. Postings of this song tend to attract those more interesting in the 'Che Guevara, murderer or martyr?' debate. Neither and both, if you must know.

8. 'To Be Lonely' by Joan As Police Woman'

One of those who aspire to wear Kate Bush's red shoes. I prefer he in quiet melancholia mode, naturally.

9. 'Silent All These Years' by Tori Amos

I was a fan of Tori Amos, but lost track of her around the time she started suckling piglets. The version linked to incorporates a Leonard Cohen recital.

10. 'Diamonds and Rust' by Joan Baez

It must irritate Joany no end that not only did Bob write the songs she's best known for, he also inspired the only song she wrote that has a life beyond her.

If you object to the Baez warble, try the Judas Priest version...

11. 'Madame George' by Marianne Faithfull

The Marianne Faithfull version is nowhere to be found - I played the single version released off the Van Morrison tribute album 'No Prima Donna' produced by Van Morrison... I've linked to the Brian Kennedy version instead. Not only does he sound like a girl, the B-sides on the single feature his versions of 'Queen of the Slipstream' and 'Irish Heartbeat.'

March guest: poet Ann Gray, author of 'At the Gate', 'The Man I Was Promised', 'Gronw's Stone' and 'Painting Skin'

2010-03-04T21:34:00.000-08:00

Poet Ann Gray is our guest on The Blah Blah Blah Show on Phonic FM on March 7th 2010 from noon until two.

Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy recently featured a poem of Ann's in her Daily Mirror column:

One night you’ll come back and I’ll wake
to see you moving noiselessly in your socks,
you’ll look bewildered, nothing’s quite the same.
You’ll be hunting through the drawers,
wondering where your clothes are.
I won’t move or speak, I’ll try not to breathe.
I’ll want to say, look in the wardrobe,
I saved your Levi boots and leather jacket.
I’ll watch you lift photos in their frames,
take them to the window. Some faces
you won’t know. You’ll guess at Beth.
I’ll watch you sink to your knees,
cover your head with your hands.
I’ll hear you whisper, Nick. Nick got married.
I’ll watch you disappear to the bathroom,
hear you brush your teeth, hear you pee,
see you reappear with a glass of whisky.
You’ll sit on the edge of the bed for ages,
until you turn and lift my hair, touch my neck,
then hold your mouth there.
Then you’ll say, so what happened?
and I’ll say, how long have you got?

Carol Ann says: "This comes from the Cornwall-based poet Ann Gray’s new collection At The Gate (Headland, 2008) a powerfully moving sequence of elegies to her partner, who was killed in a car accident. In this poem, the grief of bereavement re-imagines the lover as a Lazarus figure, returning from the dead, puzzled and disconcerted at the small changes in the bedroom and the changing, ongoing lives of the living. The closing question is unbearably poignant, holding a deeper, tragic meaning beneath its colloquial surface."

Ann is published by Headland.

Ann Gray's collections include 'At the Gate' (2008), 'The Man I Was Promised' (2004), 'Gronw's Stone: Voices from the Mabinogion, co-authored with Edmund Cusick (1997) and 'Painting Skin' (1995). She co-edited 'Having Your Cake and Eating It' (1997), an anthology celebrating food.

"Ann Gray's poetry is a measured but sumptuous revelation, like the sun coming up a few inches at a time."      Clive James

"Ann Gray writes a sensuous poetry... spans a whole range of emotions from the ethereal to the earthy."    Patricia Oxley

"This poet treads the precipice of language gracefully. The unexpected occurs throughout the book... Each poem is an individual insight."      Penelope Shuttle

The cover images of both 'The Man I Was Promised' and 'At the Gate' were painted by Michael Scott (1946-2006).

An exhibition of Michael's work will open at the Billcliffe gallery, Glasgow on October 1st with a book of his work due to be published this year.

Art Review: Dexter Dalwood at the Tate, St Ives

2010-03-04T15:23:00.000-08:00

It isn't often one discovers a like-minded artist working in one's own medium, let alone another, but Dexter Dalwood and I seem to share obsessions, an aesthetic and an approach. Why write a blog if I can't indulge myself occasionally? I went to Tate St Ives to review their Spring show, on until 3rd May before it travels to FRAC Champagne-Ardenne in the Summer followed by CAC Malaga in the Autumn where I hope to catch it again - but ended declaring affinity.

Born in 1960, Dexter is the best part of a decade older which got me thinking what defines a generation, where the boundaries lie in time. They overlap, that's for sure, and are as much about affiliation as decade I'm going to stake a claim to those years between punk and acid house, the last of the forty year youthful rebellion that began with rock'n'roll, though I wouldn't consider many who lived their teens through those years kin, kith would be fewer to those who grew up outside them.

By the time he got to art school himself in the eighties - the course of art in the late twentieth century had long been set. If abstract expressionism had seemed like the only contender in the immediate post-war years, what might be called conceptual pop has dominated the last three decades. Pretty much all the 'Young British Artists' who hit the headlines in Britpop years - Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin - fit that definition as I'd write it, all children of Andy's factory, not Jackson's barn.

It is curious then to see the same artist select a show of works made in 1971 made by artists working in various disciplines across the generations productive at that time, from the dying whale of a late Picasso and the exit daub of Oscar Kokoschka to Warhol's 'Sticky Fingers' sleeve and Electric Chair Print, by way of a selection of work of artists of the St Ives school, already two decades beyond the heyday of the colony.

In 1971, Dexter Dalwood was ten and spending a formative three years living in Cornwall when Sam Peckinpah and Dustin Hoffman were making 'Straw Dogs' just down the road, fake mist merging with the real. The sixties had ended in violence and descended into decadence with the stomping boots of glam rock a proto-punk and the likes of 'Clockwork Orange' predefining its image.

The approach to curatorship that makes his 1971 show so enjoyable is not unlike the process that produces his work. Most of Dalwood's paintings are conceived through collage in the style of R ichard Hamilton's innovations from the fifties, themselves owing much to dadaist and surrealist creations of the inter-war years. But while others stop there, Dexter uses those pieces as a launching pad for painting on canvases of a large-scale, rendering his cut-up in paint. The result is pure pop but with elements of surrealist dislocation.

By the time I'd achieved a decade, the Californian sunshine we see in 'Sharon Tate's House' (above) had shone on the horrors on other side of the couch. Dalwood's interiors have the ability to convey both 'Hello' (as in the magazine) and 'Goodbye' (the parting shot of Johnny Rotten). But like a good poem, they layer on meaning such that surface attraction soon melts through layers of reference and image.

I suspect I'll be standing in an art gallery years from now and suddenly make the connection between a Dalwood quotation and the original in front of me that itself may have incorporated quotation from the past. We are standing on the shoulders of giants. But what makes pop work where other, more avant-garde, conceptual art - and poetry - fail is that it takes surface attraction as seriously as it takes idea and process. I want to lure the reader into my work before they discover it is booby-trapped. So does he.

Dalwood, importantly, is also a colourist and knows how to use swathes of flat colour with painterly skill, whether it is the rich Matissian red of 'Diana Vreeland' or the indigo blue of one of the to-my-mind less successful more recent series of tragedies and suicides 'The Death of David Kelly'. Likewise, when it comes to the captivating 'Burroughs in Tangiers' that recreates cut-up on a larger scale - getting it down, tearing it up, reassembling it - making a magic ceremony of art.

Look closer and you see a sense of history at work. Most of the more effective pictures have an aspect of 'through the keyhole' - celebrity cribs with an empty cot - and the sense of absent presence is strong. A collage of time and place goes into recreating a place in time with regular quotations from the story of art merging into celebrity biography and the turning points of history. This is post-modernism, yes, but without the boredom that renders so much post-modernist literature of no interest to anyone but fellow practitioners of the academy.

I'm taking a similar approach to Dalwood myself in my new project 'Tom Fool' in which tales of this clownish valet to the great dictators are told first in a cut-up of source materials that is then rewritten as poems that are my own reworkings of borrowed language in fictions that are born of a sequencing of images rather than the past as it was plotted. They are meant to evoke the past rather than merely describe it, and in summoning its spirit confront it. In a Dalwood painting, the real subject of the work is most often missing.

As it happens, Dexter played bass in The Cortinas - Bristol's only punk band of note - and I didn't. It is curious to note how many artists and writers who are my contemporaries started out in music, just as many musicians who emerged in the sixties got an art school grounding. I guess creatives flock where freedom is. Punk cleared the ground that post-punk - more interesting, longer lasting - grew in. In the same way, Andy Warhol raised the factory most artists of note still work in, even if we now find his work all surface, no feeling. And practitioners like Dalwood have picked up his tools and made art following hat takes us deeper into the present in our past by following his processes.

As Dalwood says, 'How you relate to other people is... contingent on sharing certain cultural obsessions, which genuinely mean something.' Whether that lasts is questionable. Whether that matters is debatable. This is your chance to dive into a David Hockney swimming pool, both flat and deep at the same time, while there's still water in it to swim in.

Art Preview: Anthony Frost and Sir Terry Frost at the Brook Gallery, Budleigh Salterton

2010-03-02T13:44:00.000-08:00

We're hoping to feature dynastic artist, zig-zag wanderer and rag meat raconteur Anthony Frost as guest on our May 2nd show.

Many Exeter residents will have seen Anthony's of paintings and prints at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum just before it closed for refurbishment. Anthony is based in Zennor near St Ives and his work features around town with three paintings at the Salthouse Gallery, an annual exhibition at the Porthminster, and Frost family allsorts at the Tate. Visitors to London might have seen his major shows of paintings at Beaux Arts - where the Frosts have the distinction of being shown across three generations - and prints at Advanced Graphics, shortly to travel to the Armoury in New York.

Closer to our Devon HQ, Anthony has a father-son double-header coming up at the Brook Gallery, Budleigh Salterton: his own work will be shown from 27th March to 15th April immediately followed by the work of the late Sir Terry Frost from 16th April to 7th May.

The exhibition coincides with the launch of the long awaited catalogue raisonne of the prints of Sir Terry Frost. Please contact the gallery for details of the standard edition and deluxe edition of only 100 which includes a print by the artist.

Anthony has involvements across the arts. He's painted album covers and back drops for The Fall and survived the odd night on the sauce with Mark E. Smith. He occasionally acts in the play 'Art' with Bob Devereux and Phil Bowen and is the brother of comedian Stephen Frost. And poet and novelist Simon Armitage is a friend who has contributed to his last several exhibition catalogues.

We're looking forward to some great music - Anthony works to music and is a devotee of Dinosaur Jr, Captain Beefheart and P.J.Harvey among others - to accompany the repartee as Anthony looks back over his life and career and tells us where Fast 'n' Bulbous are taking him next.

Poetry: Kenny Knight and James Turner at Exeter Phoenix February 27th 2010

2010-02-20T16:02:00.000-08:00

It started with a book and ended on a t-shirt...

To their followers, they are the Mystic Seers of the Third Eye, but they prefer to describe themselves as Two Devon Poets - Kenny Knight and James Turner will be appearing together and in persons at the Drama Studio of the Exeter Phoenix on February 27th at 7.30pm, entry £5 (£3) on the door.

James Turner is author of Forgeries (Original Plus, 2003), co-author of Secret Rooms (Pebble in a Pool, 2009), and lives in Exeter.

Kenny Knight, author of The Honicknowle Book of the Dead (Shearsman, 2009), is featured in 'n the Presence of Sharks (Phlebas, 2006), and lives in Plymouth.

Kenny was guest on The Blah Blah Blah Show in February.

Six poems from The Honicknowle Book of the Dead can be read on Great Works
A review can be read on Salt and a recommendation found on this blog

Anyone turning up on the night in a 'Kenny Knight Rocks My World' t-shirt gains admittance at concessionary rate

James Turner's prize-winning poem can be found on the BBC Devon site

You can sample Forgeries on Google Books

There are currently no James Turner t-shirts available but we're working on it.

Poetry Course / Writing Holiday / Writers' Retreat with Phil Bowen in Andalucia, Spain

2010-02-17T12:07:00.000-08:00

Those of you who know me well will be aware I disappear to Andalucia, Spain from time-to-time to rest, recuperate and write. I stay at Vacas Gordas (or Fat Cows) Guest House. It's where most of my prose and much of my poetry has been written over the last five years.

My testimonial is quoted on their new website:

"A few years ago, I searched the Internet for a hideaway where I could escape the demands of my working life and devote myself to my chosen practice - writing poetry and fiction. By chance, I blundered across http://www.fatcows.net/, booked a trip, and have been coming back ever since, sometimes for a few days, often a few weeks. There are no distractions but the landscape, which is arresting, and the weather, which rarely lets you down. The accommodation is simple but soulful and the hospitality friendly but respectful of purpose. The food and drink the best that the region has to offer, lovingly prepared and presented. For days on end I do nothing but walk, think, read and write. I have a book coming out in 2010 with two more in the pipeline, and most of the creative work was done here in Andalucia, where the mountains meet the sea. Whatever your reason for retreat, alone or in a group, you will find refuge and reinvigoration at Cortijo Vacas Gordas". Damian Furniss, February 2010

It's good to hear that Phil Bowen, a past guest on The Blah Blah Blah Show, is running a creative writing course there this autumn, focusing on poetry.

23 - 30 October 2010
A Fresh Look and A Fresh Listen
A sharply focused 4/5 day poetry-driven creative writing course designed to enliven, enlarge and enlighten. Through challenging yet approachable and time-honoured exercises, the course is guaranteed to free up hitherto dormant source material and be both stimulating and highly enjoyable. Free time for relaxation and visits. Course led by Phil Bowen - poet, performer, biographer and playwright.

Cost is about £100 per day all-inclusive of accommodation, food and drink and tuition.

Enquiries welcome, some places still available.

the venue is also perfect for retreats alone, in a couple, or a small group. Rates for B&B and fully catered accommodation are quoted on the website.

Flybe has regular flights from Exeter to Malaga.

Cabaret: Review and Preview - 'The Antidote' and 'The Anecdote' at The Bike Shed Theatre, Exeter

2010-02-15T20:29:00.000-08:00

The Antidote and The Anecdote

On Sunday 14th and Sunday 21st February, Particular Theatre Companyare producing an evening of comedy, music, plays, sketches and poetry at The Bike Shed Theatre. Starting from 18.00-22.00 and featuring a variety of talent from around Devon and beyond, these evenings will prove the perfect way to wash away the February blues. And, even better, they are completely free.

Those of you who read my preview or review of 'The Distance' - or have attended a performance yourself as it goes into the second of its three week run - may have already picked up on The Particular Theatre Company's Sunday cabaret evenings when the actors involved in the production get an evening off and other local talent come out to play.

The auditorium is transformed with tabled and candlelit seating and the curtains that separate theatre from bar are pulled back to make for a relaxed setting - it's fine to arrive late, leave early, or come in and out as there are plenty of breaks between turns. The company's connections with The Hour Glass Inn ensure the quality of the booze is high and if the temperature is cold the atmosphere is warm and friendly.

Think Weimar Cabaret meets Footlights Revue and that should give you an idea of what to expect. The first night didn't just have Valentine's Day to compete with but also the Wondermentalist Cabaret's Liv Torc and Beryl the Feral doing their 'For Our Sins' show at the Phoenix in Exeter so there were always seats to be had, but with enough in the crowd to generate some kind of buzz.

The quality of the acts was variable - from cruise ship to the Lapin Agile - but none overstayed their welcome. Without a notebook to record the names I can't provide an act-by-act commentary but among the bill were: Sam and Dave, presenting comedy sketches on stage and screen; Craig Norman doing performance poetry; David Lockwood and chum reciting pop lyrics as audition pieces; a monologue delivered partly in the voice and persona of Mike Tyson; and The Duelling Kazoos busking comic skiffle.

The latter deserve special mention as they're donating their time and talent to Phonic FM's second birthday bash and fundraiser on Saturday 20th February from 20.00 at the Phoenix Arts Centre in Exeter with live music also from Dumber Than the Average Bear, Glow Globes and Class Actions plus a full roster of Phonic FM DJs. At a fiver a ticket with every penny of the proceeds going to keeping the station on air, it's the least you can do to attend.

Incidentally, I understand Ben Bradshaw, our local MP and current Secretary of Culture is paying a visit to the Bike Shed tonight. And if he's reading, it's projects like this that give the best return on investment for arts funding. For every one Jonathan Ross you can keep a score or more pop-up theatres going...

Cinema: Review - 'A Single Man'

2010-02-14T07:43:00.000-08:00

'A Single Man'

Regular readers of my cinema reviews will know I like to judge a film by its audience. I realise that a first weekend crowd says more about the marketing of a film than the film itself, but it gives me something to do while the adverts are on and the house lights are up. I'm deeply suspicious of any movie that attracts people in groups of more than two. The movie theatre is not a social setting, but one for quiet contemplation. 'A Single Man' suffered no groups. Even better, although the cinema was unusually full for an early afternoon showing, the singletons and couples in attendance spaced themselves out by a geometric formula that meant three never had to sit together.

I was pleasantly surprised by the number of grey haired couples in attendance. This is a movie with a resolutely queer aesthetic and the fact that it appeals to the middle-aged and middle-class demographic of middle England shows how far society has come in the last ten or fifteen years in its tolerance of, and interest in, difference, sexual or otherwise. Those alone were of both genders and various persuasions, judging by visual cues alone. Tom Ford also drew his own crowd. I am largely ignorant of fashion designers and who they appeal to but from the elderly ladies tottering around in furs and elegant young men in polo necks and cashmere overcoats, I'd say his customers are well-heeled if somewhat ditzy (female) or metropolitan homosexuals of the Cameroonian persuasion (male).

Anyway, my companions in darkness kept me entertained until the trailers were run and beyond. When the film started, I thought maybe they'd made an error in the projection room and reeled an episode of 'Mad Men' by mistake. Not that I'd have minded - I'm a 'Mad Men' fan and would love to see it on the big screen, it is probably the best designed and costumed TV show ever. I've since found out that programme and film share a design team as well as location in time (early sixties) and space (America), the difference being 'Mad Men' is east coast, 'A Single Man' west. 'Mad Men' has actually made me rethink my attitude to the sixties which I now consider to have been spoilt by The Beatles, not made by them. Were it nor for those Liverpudlian half-wits, the music of the decade would have been jazz, the look skinny suits and skinny ties for the men, cocktail dresses for the girls, and everyone would have lived in modernist houses of wood and glass, their drugs of choice being scotch and cigarettes and their favoured cars built like airplanes and usually found parked outside country clubs.

'A Single Man' is an adaptation of the novel by Christopher Isherwood in which an English college professor relocated to California is living his last day on earth. In mourning for his younger lover, prohibited from even attending his funeral by a family in denial, George Falconer (played by Colin Firth) has decided on a meticulously planned exit strategy. Whether you empathise with his predicament will most likely define your response to the film. He is a man nostalgic about the past, honourable in the present but with no interest in the future. If he was a creative, that is no longer apparent. Even his teaching has lost its sense of purpose, most of the students aping beatnik disinterest. His only friend is a louche female lush also in exile from London society, played with indeterminate accent but charming zest by Julianne Moore.

He retains a fatal attraction to the adolescent male, and if this trait of the middle-aged loner disturbs, you'd best stay away. A brief encounter with a Hispanic hustler is never consummated , but the scenario is clearly familiar to him. The one student who is drawn into his orbit and ultimately - however briefly - saves his life is played by Nicholas Hoult, best known in this country for his role as Tony Stonem in the first two series of Skins, the one actor from that car-chase-come-car-crash of youth TV you can tip for an acting career. (I commend Kaya Scodelario - who plays his sister Effy, and is the key character in the fourth more-miss-than-hit season - to a future as a model, but that's another story.) If this were a contemporary campus drama and the scenario was straight rather than gay, I suspect we'd have been served up with a feast of tabloid shock and broadsheet moral analysis, but boy love is okay so long as its contained in costume drama, which the movie undoubtedly is, albeit of an era some of its viewers have lived through. Christopher Isherwood was renowned for his taste in pretty youths - first in the decadent Weimar Republic, then liberal California - and it is to Colin Firth's credit that his portrayal incorporates the peccadillo into a rounded study of a complex character.

Tom Ford is new to film direction and this credible and creditable debut hangs on Firth's performance who you stay with ultimately because of his English decency, exemplified by the thoughtfulness expressed in his preparations for end-of-life and the genuine care and interest he shows in the futures of others even as he gives up on his own. It won't appeal to a family audience - family life is portrayed as banal, children curious monsters, heterosexual attraction almost incomprehensible and generally for show - but it has already broken out of the niche of gay cinema and found a wider public, and makes thoughts of suicide seem almost life-affirming, coming-to-terms-with-life being a prelude to coming-to-terms-with-death.

Coming soon: 'Chocolate Che' by Damian Furniss (2)

2010-02-13T12:48:00.000-08:00

Coming soon: 'Chocolate Che' by Damian Furniss

2010-02-13T12:43:00.000-08:00

Theatre: Review - 'The Distance', Particular Theatre Company, Bike Shed Theatre

2010-02-13T03:24:00.000-08:00

In our February show on Sunday we previewed the Particular Theatre Company's production of 'The Distance', a dystopian drama of the near-future written by Craig Norman and directed by David Lockwood. Yesterday I went to the first night of a three week run (8th to 27th February) in the newly opened The Bike Shed Theatre situated in the heart of Exeter between Fore Street and Mary Arches Street.

Particular's autumn production of 'Forsaken' was put on in the cellar of the Hour Glass Inn and featured in my piece on pub theatre. The new, semi-permanent venue is better described as pop-up theatre - a former basement restaurant taken initially on a four-month lease makes an ideal seventy seat theatre space complete with a well-stocked bar - you can take a glass to your seat and replenish it during the interval - that looks like it's been imaginatively furnished from a funky junk shop because it has.

Otto Retro are one of several local companies who deserve credit for part-funding the project in cash or kind. Other Fore Street shops Electric Gypsy and Bunyip contributed costumes. The Bike Shed have lent their name to the theatre and their money to get it up and running while The Fat Pig on John Street not only put on special meal-and-a-drink deal for theatre goers but also support the venture.

Exeter Arts Council have likewise contributed - and if Particular Theatre Company are to survive on more than good will, no doubt they'll need more public money in future from a diminishing pot - but I think it important to mention sponsors when times are hard to encourage well matched local partnerships such as this.

Also to mutual credit and advantage is the involvement of the Cygnet Training Theatre - for those who don't know The New Theatre at Friar's Gate in Exeter, keep an eye on its programme - Exeter College and Exeter University. Students will be involved in the front-of-house team and some of the 10 o'clock shows (one act plays free to all-comers), while the cast of the main production is both trained and experienced, an excellent way to introduce young drama and arts management students to professional theatre.

On to the review... On Sunday's The Blah Blah Blah Show Rachel McCarthy and I discussed the cinema of the post-apocalypse when reviewing 'The Road', wondering if end-of-the-world art reemerges at times of tension - the early sixties after the Cuban missile crisis, the early eighties at the height of the cold war and the turn of the current decade as the left worry about climate change while the right focus on the threat of terrorists and rogue nations.

'The Distance' might be described as theatre of the pre-apocalypse, and that to me is more interesting. How we'd react in a world that is broken - really broken, as it is in 'The Road' - would be a matter of brute survival. But how we respond as a society is breaking asks more immediate and interesting questions, the situation being much easier to project ourselves into, the scenario of the play one that might not be so far away - once the dominoes of civilisation start falling, perhaps we are so interdependent, they'll all come tumbling down.

So the world of 'The Distance' is wholly recognisable to us, and the four characters that occupy it are ones we can empathise with - a husband and wife, a mother and son, a daughter and her father - and so their reactions to breakdown, personal and societal, are ones we can understand. Madness begins to seem like a sane reaction. And if escapism is not the answer, at least it avoids the question, as does intoxication - and I'll drink to that.

Or do we hang onto the trappings of civilisation, fiddle while Rome burn? Would you bring a child into this world? And if you did, would you want it to live, when it could never be safe from harm? These are the sorts of questions Craig Norman wrestles with in his script, and if the play doesn't provide any easy answers, the same uncertainties will be nagging away at you 24 hours later - and that is the mark of a worthwhile piece of art, it shadows your lungs.

We react to tragedy in different ways: some couples it brings closer together, others it drives apart. We look to others for protection, only to discover they can't even defend themselves. That is where the young couple, whose relationship is the hinge the play swings on, are at when the play begins on a stage that takes up almost half of the auditorium, lives lived in three dimensions from the outset, not squashed into a corner as in some boutique theatres. That gives the set and sound designers a space to work with and they do a good job, painting in a palette of whites and greys, conjuring up a soundscape of millenarian tension.

The first act is a single scene; the second alternates between double headers either side of the stage, bisected by two metal pillars the direction makes use of rather than denying; the third, almost a coda, is an intimate conversation on the lip of the stage that hints at reconciliation, but whether with the future or in the past we are left unsure. We are always inside private domains, but there are enough references for us to know what ever is going on outside, we don't want to be there; that if it comes bursting through the door, it won't be a welcome guest. David Lockwood has to negotiate us through an emotional landscape in which the characters are never quite connecting, despite all the connections between them, and must fill that surprisingly large stage with a small cast, succeeding on both counts.

Charlie Coldfield as Darby impressed with a deceptive lightness of being that didn't mask the desperation behind his eyes. Alison Collinge as Alex has the most demanding role, taking her character to the edge of madness without ever quite tumbling over into the abyss, and brings us back to her with a vulnerability that was perhaps always tat he root of their attraction. The words 'husband' and 'wife' are used over again, reminding you that some relationships sustain almost as a matter of fact against the furies. 'Mother' and 'father' are, even more so, archetypes that cannot be denied. Jane Bennett as Nora brings her experience to bear on a role that has to combine maternal grit with a sense of imminent surrender. David Watkinson as Peter is hollow-eyed and half-absent, having left his better self behind on the front of some unspecified conflict, his daughter relating to him almost wholly as her protector of the past, a role he didn't always fulfill.

A first night is never perfect and rarely fully realised. This is a demanding play that requires is cast to portray - and audience believe in - some extreme situations and then deal with the emotional fallout. The way in which they do so is very English - and that switchback between confrontation and restraint is the heartbeat of the piece that relies on both full-on and nuanced dramatisation. I'm tempted to return for the last night of the run to see how the performance and its staging have progressed, and it is a play that will benefit from a second sitting.

Particular Theatre is taking risks with this project. They aren't presenting populist theatre. There are no names involved sufficient to draw an audience. This is a play for a bleak February evening, leaving us with a slight chill, a longing for something warm. The Company will rely initially on goodwill and then word of mouth and intrigue in the kind of evening Exeter usually lacks, a dare for the city to respond with its feet and put some bums on seats.

They have already committed to two further productions which I for one look forward to. 'Still' by Steve Lambert from 12th April to 1st May will be previewed in excerpt at the 10 o'clock show on 26th February while a scene from 'Beanfield' by Shaun McCarthy, forthcoming in June, will feature on 27th February.

In between, another eight short dramas will be premiered, all written by south-west writers and free of charge to the audience of the main show and passersby. Last night and tonight featured 'Good Morning', a ten minute two-handed skit on suicide, by Isley Lynn. Check the website for the roster over the remainder of the three week run.

If the venue intrigues you, two evenings of music, poetry, stand-up, drama and sketches - 'Antidote / Anecdote' - are scheduled for Sundays 14th and 21st of February from 6pm to 10pm. We are promised tables with candles and both frivolous and thought provoking entertainment.

Why not spend your weekend getting behind the Bike Shed and combine a variety Sunday with a Saturday night of serious drama?

Poetry: Review - 'Fruitcake', 'Bunny' and 'Violet' by Selima Hill

2010-02-13T03:23:00.000-08:00

On reading 'Fruitcake', the latest collection - or compendium of collections - by Selima Hill, I decided that she doesn't approach poetry like other poets approach poetry, she approaches the production of poems like artists approach the production of paintings. That is the only way in which I can come to terms with her escalating prolificity at a point in her career when most of her fellows rest on their laurels, find themselves an academic sinecure, write travel articles or sketches of their memoirs for Sunday supplements - do all the things that writers who can no longer be bothered much with writing do.

In 2008, Selima published 'Gloria', a 336 page selected poems more substantial than most collected volumes. Simultaneously, she unveiled 'The Hat', an unusually slim collection concerning female identity I've not even caught up with yet. Last year, she won the Flarestack Poetry Pamphlet Competition with 'Advice on Wearing Animal Prints' which was published as a result. Far be it for me to question the integrity of the judges - I've not even read the thing, so am open to accusations of talking out of my leopard skin pillbox hat - but if this Selima Hill is anything like any other Selima Hill I've read, I'd know I was reading Selima Hill within the lines of the first poem. All poetry competition judges being as paranoid as I am, I'd then begin to suspect that I was reading the work of an accomplished Selima Hill imitator, adopting her voice and her themes but to lesser effect than the Lilith of Lyme. I'd then lure the administrator of the contest into my dilemma - if this is the real deal, Selima testing her mojo is still working by entering anonymously, she wins first prize; if someone taking on her tropes in the manner of a skilled forger of Picasso or Dali, I'd win the booby prize - and make the award conditionally.

Fortunately, unlike me, all poetry judges and publishers have integrity, so you shouldn't read into my stewing on this any of the ingredients of truth. But what is more remarkable is that again last year - the year after she published both 'Gloria' and 'Hat', the year in which she published 'Advice on Wearing Animal Prints' - Selima also baked 'Fruitcake', four sequences of 'poems about motherhood' (in the same sense that 'MacBeth' and 'Alice in Wonderland' are about motherhood) each of which could be a collection in its own right - another 238 pages of Hillage.

Back to my thoughts on Selima as painter (Tracey Emin, to be precise, of whom I'm a genuine admirer; her memoir 'Strangeland' I unreservedly recommend) the poems in 'Fruitcake' (and she must've written at least one a day) take on each image and explore it over the length of several pieces. This may not be such a daft theory - Selima was born to a couple of Hampstead artists and while I don't know their work or method, she'd have grown up among visual artists and learnt how to be an artist from them. I rather admire this approach, but sometimes you feel like you're leafing through an exceptionally gifted artist's sketchbook looking for the major work, or an idea that might become it. And you begin to focus more on method than content, when content is king in my pre-modernist mind.

For all that, it is great fun, and if you are a fan - as you surely are, even if you don't know it yet - then you'll have fun with this book, even if you end up wondering if she isn't publishing too much (not writing too much, you can never write too much). And if you're lazy like me and want a one poem primer so you can pretend you've read the book I suggest 'Icy Metal' on p.157 which leads me to believe that Selima might have been watching 'Ice Road Truckers' while licking at her ice cream.

I realise that was a long way round not reviewing a book so in compensation I'm republishing my previous reviews of two of Selima's books originally published in Poetry Quarterly Review...

Selima Hill BUNNY BLOODAXE BOOKS / 2001 / 80pp / £7.95 / ISBN 1 85224 507 7 PORTRAIT OF MY LOVER AS A HORSE BLOODAXE BOOKS / 2002 / 80pp / £7.95 / ISBN 1 85224 600 6

Selima Hill has crashed recent poetry shebangs like a bag lady at the ball, carting trolley loads of awards back to Dorset where, I imagine, she feeds her menagerie of cats and ducks pilfered caviar from engraved silver salvers whilst dancing in the laundry in evening dress, wringing her fingers through the poetry mangle.

BUNNY’s eroticism is its danger; the lodger at its heart lets his desire do the stalking. The need for love and acceptance is baited then beaten into a realm of the unsaid where metaphor defines the boundaries that have been violated. Meanwhile, suburban aunts are distracted by their little dogs and home is a place in some far away mind.

Selima is a mistress of the image and finds a killer to love in every poem. Where others would make a meal of each memory, she prefers to slither the fat away to create little carpaccios, potent with the heat of unforgetting, as in SHEETS:

The sheets and towels of rented rooms

repeat

a million ways

of failing to say home.

The forward propulsion of this ark of a book is a series of little earthquakes, each containing the possibility of a tsunami somewhere across the ocean of time. It is a talent to re-inhabit the past rather than merely project the present onto its backdrop. What is achieved is more than just recounting experience; it is reliving it in the language of revelation that defines adolescence, as in SKY:

For sky that slips between her thighs like oysters,

for sheets like seas,

for laps like seals,

thank You.

Thank You for inventing space, O Lord.

Selima deploys this device of a master of the inner world to address throughout her more recent volume where he takes the form of the sacred in each lover and child and gives the pieces a particular intimacy, often challenged by the wonderfully eccentric yet sometimes strangely impersonal imagery, making him ‘…a sort of resident flower arrangement.’

Next to BUNNY, …HORSE sometimes reads like the result of a workshop exercise attended by a bedlam of doppelgangers. The hundred portraits of her lover are arranged alphabetically to defy any linear thread. As with BUNNY, images repeat themselves and verbal riffs recur, but without the narrative thrust they do not reveal themselves differently according to their context. The cumulative impression is more mosaic then conclusion. Plotted as a graph, we sense the fall from grace, a dip into darkness that encourages the discovery of the next source of light.

The covers of both books betray their common character; the rabbit or horse of the titles stare out with one eye reflecting the spotlight while the other is absent, gazing distractedly into inner space, tracing words in the stars. Selima Hill is of this world and another, and that is what makes a poet.

Cinema: Review - 'A Prophet'

2010-02-13T01:38:00.000-08:00

'A Prophet'

Being an aficionado of both the jail house flick and the mobster movie, 'A Prophet' was always likely to appeal to me and my kind. Hotly tipped for best foreign language film (it is in colloquial French, Corsican and Arabic; not many will be able to understand it all without substitles) at this year's Oscars, it really ought to feature in the best movie shortlist - in my world, it would win it. That doesn't mean it's an easy watch, but although the first two-thirds of the movie is wholly contained within a piss-stained prison in which any authority beyond that of the inmates' own order is near-invisible and only in the final third do we make occasional forays into the outside world, and then only in the cause of crime, there is much to learn about life here.

Its plot line and setting may seem to have most in common with some of the classics of seventies Hollywood - 'The Godfather' series, 'Papillon', 'Serpico', 'Midnight Express' - but its more obvious and telling antecedents are European and contemporary, in particular 'Gomorra', a Neapolitan mob movie that was near the top of my 2008 list. Whereas American crime movies can never resist glamour, 'Gomorra' majored on grime. It emphasised the extent to which organised crime touches on ordinary lives, especially of the poor and dispossessed who have no more choice than to cooperate with its power structures than they do with those of the state. So close to the truth was it, its writer Roberto Saviano has been living under threat of death ever since.

Like 'Gomorra', 'A Prophet' is probably best viewed as a coming-of-age movie, Tahar Rahim as Malik El Djebena being banged up for six years at the age of nineteen for unspecified crimes against a police officer he may or may not have been guilty of, terrified and alone. Fitting in with neither the Corsican mob who rule by influence, threat and occasional force nor the North Africans with whom he shares a heritage but not a faith, Malik makes his way by doing a deal with the devil early on, but never taking his side. In the end, he works his outsider status to his advantage, building his own power base through opportunism rather than loyalty. Likewise, his introverted and enigmatic nature makes him the ideal observer - initially as a spy for others, ultimately on missions of his own.

If the prospect of spending over two hours seeing a closed and macho world from the point-of-view of an initially naive but ultimately smart and ruthless criminal - murderer, assassin, drug dealer - who learns how to survive and ultimately prosper in jail has no appeal, you might want to stop reading now. But deep down this is a film about growing up, getting an education and forging an identity when the odds are stacked against you, a classic formula for fiction and film. And there is never a moment when you doubt the reality of the milieu, however alien it may be to you. Prison becomes a place of freedom, without ties or responsibilities, in which it is possible to reinvent yourself. Society inside the jail is corrupt, but by its conclusion you're in no doubt that it is a microcosm of the outside world that runs to similar rules, the ultimate authority being force, not the law that in some cases gives it legitimacy.

Innocent and yet able to exploit the weaknesses of the guilty, a born survivor who starts out as underdog but becomes topdog on his own terms, using his fear and always choosing well between fight and flight, our antihero is as lonely as Hamlet and has visions of his own, newcomer Tahar Rahim's performance is compelling. Niels Arestrup is superb in the Lear-like supporting role as the king of the mob whose power is incrementally stripped off him. As heavy on the conventions of its genre as 'A Prophet' may appear to be from this summary of theme and plot, it ultimately transcends the cliches of the prison drama without denying their banal veracity. It is compulsive - and should be compulsory - viewing.

Poetry: Review - 'The Hoplite Journals' by Martin Anderson

2010-02-11T16:46:00.000-08:00

At the risk of alienating the more casual visitor, I'm continuing with my occasional republication of reviews, essays and features written for literary magazines. In this case - with Tremblestone in abeyance - 'Hotel of Shadows' hasn't and may never be printed on the page, but it seems a shame for it never to be read when reviews are at a premium for any writer...

HOTEL OF SHADOWS

Martin Anderson, The Hoplite Journals.

Shearsman Books, 58 Velwell Road, Exeter, EX4 4LD

Martin Anderson realises a form in which action and dialogue are of the inner world, that is the outer world turned outside-in; compiles a phrase book to translate sensation into perception, and then reflects upon it; the mind a hall of mirrors in which the ego exists, though as we chase it, the less like fire and more like smoke it seems. That panoply of diverse vistas, voices. Where are you, unable to sit still, taking off to now?

These meditations occur at the boundary between occidental and oriental modes of self-enquiry, thought experiments that occur in the cities of Asia where east meets west, shape shifting and casting shadow plays in the magic lantern of the self. They owe something to the art of loci, a memory technique that Matteo Ricci took to China as the memory palace, a visual repository of ideas and images situated in architectural space. Draw this line around your life, here, where it does not exist; locate yourself at this particular point in space and time, and then eradicate it.

Malraux and Picasso further developed the concept as their musée imaginaire, a gallery without walls where they hung not so much objects of art as ideas of art, unconstrained by physical possession. Anderson’s own method is less static, a journey through landscape of place and mind in the tradition of Basho’s poetic diaries, in and of the world and yet beyond it. They are not explicitly Buddhist but a seeker in that tradition would recognise their quality of insight. They are not linear either, but do move.

Those are the frames, what of the pictures? The Hoplite Journals are the records of campaigns into where language can take us, intense inner battles against complacency with words, the author challenging himself to experience as if for the first time, and capture what cannot be captured as precisely as motes allow. A long poem, then, divided into cantos, each section of which is a chain of thought to be escaped from, the reader as Houdini.

Absorbing such work demands an approach that puts mind on the line. The common sense is of being elsewhere, never quite at home, and on edge like this horizon, upon which we listen for our own lives, ungarlanded and uncelebrated, as they arrive and leave without us. We are invited to make connections we don’t ordinarily make, like seeing familiar landscapes from above, or living a day of our life in another body.

Why do we become alien, choose exile? There is self-pleasure in the isolation of being abroad, but to achieve it is never easy. We are always reaching for the just out of reach, the tension Anderson inhabits but is restless in, wanting the moon, not just the finger. Keep on keeping on. For all children are brought up in a land that is foreign, and are, therefore, natural and curious travellers. Perspectives and tenses switch, the cubist language of Blood on the Tracks. And even when the train stopped, no one got on or got off.

One travels alone or does not travel at all…Over the empty tract of this page voices are calling. Liquid prose, not so much finding its place as defining it, a meniscus on the contours of what is. Alone, each of us, amidst the floating debris of all lived moments known and unknown to us. Here is the country that does not exist. There is the woman who died at the passing of her own illusions. Words wrought by tough love, in paragraphs the size and shape of instants. Inflate the balloon, then burst it. Now try and blow it up again. We yearn to capture the fleeting drift of ephemera that define us, situating our being.

The danger is that language detached from its ordinary purpose stiffens, becomes sallow, a book on the slab. But this is not the work of a coroner. It engages with life, does not detach us from it. The objective is to break the boredom of sameness that contains us, escape the grey of a northern continent, not seeing through the fog of unlived days. We remember only that which can be forgotten. Pursuing the many, finding the few, sifting the fewer for the one until we have become what we contemplate.

Again, the risk of existing in life as a cultured consumer, lost in our base sophistication, not shaping but only receiving. Such are the temptations of the megalopolis and the contrary urge to escape it, until we entered a landscape where the city was forgotten. Spiritual tourism is not the answer. Anderson’s rituals are private, not off-the-shelf observations; he peers beneath surfaces, knowing identity is a reflection on the water we can reach into and thus disrupt, reform. Place, time and object, yearn for that ideal solitude that will reunite them. This is the ungiven - that which cannot be taken away.

If a poet is true to himself, the idea of the poem is invariably greater than the poem itself. Anderson plays on this tragedy. Memory becomes tincture, a homeopathic presence, intangible but pervasive. There is existential comedy aplenty here. Messages dictated, sent by telegram, translated by the shaman of an obscure tribe who traces these mysterious markings with his fingers, symbols etched on a sacred log, and intones them as Artaud. A time before instant communication, in which we achieve so little by saying so much.

Anderson takes the responsibility of creation seriously, decrying the replication of the familiar, those who seek patronage and prizes for mimicking the scriveners who have gone before them, with ever diminishing returns; ants dragging looted booty towards the queen of recognition, apple seeds from ruined orchards. The endless clack of typewriters – infinity’s monkeys. We’ve read enough. We’ve read too much, already.

Instead, he invites us to draw up the bamboo ladder – climb above, look down, look up, transcend. Exercise the method of doubt. Discard the known to know. Disrupt the routine by the extraordinary and you have poetry. Is that what we came here for? Impermanence is a given. Beginnings end. The leaves fall. Our lives return to what they were before we claimed them. I commend this book; its pages are fragile and will fall apart, though you will go first, into the unknown and unknowable, its greatest concern.

Damian Furniss.

Playlist: February 2010

2010-02-11T13:36:00.000-08:00

1. 'Sweet Gene Vincent' by Ian Dury and the Blockheads

My co-host Rachel McCarthy dared call the music and lyrics of the great Ian Dury 'trite' in our pre-show discussion. In revenge, I'm reproducing the lyric to the song we kicked off with so you can sing along...

blue gene baby

skinny white sailor, the chances were slender
the beauties were brief
shall I mourn you decline with some thunderbird wine
and a black hankercheif?
I miss your sad Virginia whisper
I miss the voice that called my heart

sweet gene vincent
young and old and gone
sweet gene vincent

who, who, who slapped john?

white face, black shirt
white socks, black shoes
black hair, white strat
bled white, died black

sweet gene vincent
let the blue roll tonight
at the sock hop ball in the union hall
where the bop is their delight

here come duck-tailed Danny dragging Uncanny Annie
she's the one with the flying feet
you can break the peace daddy sickle grease
the beat is reet complete
and you jump back honey in the dungerees
tight sweater and a pony tail
will you guess her age when she comes back stage?
the hoodlems bite thier nails

black gloves, white frost
black crepe, white lead
white sheet, black knight
jet black, dead white

sweet gene vincent
there's one in every town
and the devil drives 'til the hearse arrives
and you lay that pistol down

sweet gene vincent
there's nowhere left to hide
with lazy skin and ash-tray eyes
a perforated pride

so farewell mademoiselle, knicker-bocker hotel
farewell to money owed
but when your leg still hurts and you need more shirts
you got to get back on the road

2. 'Jokerman' by Bob Dylan

If I get Bob in early, I don't forget... Long enough to go get our guest Kenny Knight, get him down to the studio and let him get his feet under the desk. 'Jokerman' features a crack studio band that included a rhythm section of Sly and Robbie and both Mick Taylor and Mark Knopfler on lead guitars. The song is also one of Dylan's most enigmatic lyrics.

3. 'Growin' Up' by Bruce Springsteen

We went with Springsteen's acoustic demo rather than the E-Street Band version on 'Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ' and this video captures Bruce solo at Max's Kansas City, NY in 1972.

4. 'Seven Mile Island' by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit

And there was me expecting Telstar and The Shadows... Kenny had the good grace to choose contemporary music that fitted The Blah Blah Blah Show's music policy nicely. The "400 Unit" was the former colloquial name of the psychiatric ward of Florence, Alabama's Eliza Coffee Memorial Hospital, which is now named the Behavioral Health Center, or One North, and is located on the hospital's first floor. Maybe you know it?

5. 'Bayou Tortous' by James McMurty

More Americana from our guest... Anyone would think Kenny came from Austin, Texas not Honicknowle, Plymouth the selection he went for. McMurty's not much of a looker so you get to see a young woman doing the hula-hoop to his music instead.

6. 'Sounds Better in the Song' by Drive By Truckers

Jason Isbell's former band, this is alt-country a Texan would be proud to doff his ten gallon stetson to. Other members include Patterson Hood, Mick Cooley, Shonna Tucker and Jay Gonzalez - they have better names in American rock bands, don't you think?

7. 'Further on up the Road' by Bruce Springsteen

The best song off The Rising - Springsteen's post 9/11 album - this is the kind of music Bruce was born to make - anthemic rock'n'roll with heart, brains and soul. Johnny Cash recorded it on American V. 'Nuff said.

8. 'Lady Day and John Coltrane' by Gil Scot Heron

New York funky-soul-jazz-blues-beat-poetry to celebrate the great Gil Scot Heron's first album in fifteen years - 'I'm New Here'. Phonic DJs doesn't get pre-release copies or payola of any kind so you got to hear this classic instead. Great vibes, great vibes playing.

9. 'Karmacoma' by Massive Attack

If all rap was done in West Country accents, hip-hop would never leave my turntable... Another artist with a new album out the day after the show; another masterclass in marrying lyric and beat; the video version is taken from a Jools Holland Show and trades the deep bass of the recording for Talvin Singh's tabla playing.

10. 'Black Rider' by Tom Waits

With words by William S. Burroughs - you can hear him barking as the track fades - this 1993 album's songs were written for a 1990 theatrical production of the same name, finally premiered in Britain at the Edinburgh Festival in 1998.

11. 'Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll' by Ian Dury and the Blockheads

To celebrate our review of the movie of the same name and The Blockheads March 6th appearance at our Phoenix base in Exeter we play two tracks by a single artists twice in one show just because we can... Weren't Norman Watt-Ray and Charley Charles an awesome rhythm section? Ian Dury is the only actor to have made films with both Tom Waits and Bob Dylan. Like Bob, he also recorded and toured with Robbie Shakespeare and Sly Dunbar. Sweet!

12. 'Helpless' by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Recorded at the same session as the album 'More Pricks than Kicks', this Neil Young song was released on 'The Bridge', a 1989 various artists tribute to its writer to raise money for The Bridge School for autistic children which also benefits from an annual fundraiser organised by the man and his wife. I still treasure this album on cassette but you can find it on CD and it's well worth tracking down:

1. Barstool Blues - Soul Asylum

2. Don't Let It Bring You Down - Victoria Williams

3. After the Gold Rush - Flaming Lips

4. Captain Kennedy - Nikki Sudden

5. Cinnamon Girl - Loop

6. Helpless - Nick Cave

7. Mr. Soul - Bongwater

8. Winterlong - Pixies

9. Computer Age - Sonic Youth

10. Only Love Can Break Your Heart - Psychic TV

11. Lotta Love - Dinosaur Jr.

12. Needle and the Damage Done/Tonight's the Night - Henry Kaiser

13. Out of the Blue - B.A.L.L.

14. Words - Henry Kaiser

Poetry: February Guest - Kenny Knight

2010-02-05T10:37:00.000-08:00

Our guest on The Blah Blah Blah Show on Sunday 7th February 12:00 - 14:00 is Kenny Knight.

Tune in to Phonic FM - 106.8 FM in the Exeter Area to hear Kenny discuss his book 'The Honicknowle Book of the Dead' which was one of our recommendations of 2009.

His appearance on the show previews a performance at The Exeter Phoenix on Saturday 27th February at 19.30 with Exeter's own James Turner.

A sample of Kenny's poetry can be read at Great Works.

A review of 'The Honicknowle Book of the Dead' is published on the Salt website.

Theatre: 'The Distance' by the Particular Theatre Company

2010-01-31T06:07:00.000-08:00

In our ongoing series on arts in the recession, we discussed the phenomenon of pub theatre and its potential to deliver productions of merit, to an audience beyond regular theatre goers, on a budget relying on little or no subsidy. I reviewed 'Forsaken' by the Particular Theatre Company who'd recently staged a three week run of a new piece of writing - together with before and after shorts of comedy and poetry - in the basement of The Hour Glass Inn in Exeter, ending with the wish that they'd extend the experiment to future shows.

My wish was their command and they are back with 'The Distance', a new play by Dorset writer Craig Norman, described as a poetic drama in which a married couple struggle to maintain fractured relationships with each other and their parents, in a world where land is precious and you don't know who you can trust. Featuring an accomplished professional cast and crew in an intimate space, the show should share many of the elements that made its predecessor a commercial and artistic success, but this time they've created their own seventy seat space - the Bike Shed Theatre just off Fore Street in Exeter, right in the centre of town. They are licensed for drink and have done a food deal with the nearby Flying Pig, maintaining the elements that make pub theatre a social night out.

Just as importantly, they've kept to their philosophy of exposing their audience to new work by encouraging us to stay on for 10 o'clock slots, one act plays by local writers that change every day or two. It's a win-win of a concept. The theatre ups its revenue by selling a few drinks while the punters wait for the stage to be reset. The audience gets an add-on to the experience if they want it. Playwrights and actors get a chance to try out new work in front of a paying crowd while the producers can gauge their reactions to new talent.

'The Distance' runs from 8th to 27th February and starts at 19.30. Tickets are available online at 10 pounds and if you're reading this on the day of posting and are quick off the mark you can still get them at the early bird price of a fiver. I'll be there for the preview and hope to add a short review below while there's still time for you to get seats for a night later in the run.

On Sundays 14th and 21st of February at 17.00 they are also hosting free evenings of comedy, music and poetry - Antidote/Anecdote - which sound a good way to end a winter weekend.

Cinema: Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll

2010-01-31T05:11:00.000-08:00

'Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll'

Ian Dury was the bastard offspring of a three-way between Richard III, Max Wall and Edward Lear. His act was pure music hall with a musical backing that owed more to funk than punk and yet he was the clown prince of the punk movement, had the look and attitude before either were safety-pinned onto the various pub rock combos that followed in the wake of the Sex Pistols. They revered him and his original band, Kilburn and the High Roads, set the scene, along with the likes of Dr Feelgood, and were also a major influence on the London ska revival led by Madness.

At the risk of packing the Undead Poets' Society with lyricists and performers, however talented, Dury deserves induction because, he like John Cooper Clarke, was a funny man but had something of the night about him. More importantly, he had a dextrous and daring aptitude for rhyme and was demented in his disruption of syntax to get syllables to dance to his rhythm four-to-the-floor funk rather than garage band punk, giving his words far more space to work in than most lyricists of the movement.

In the guise of Andy Serkis, previously best known for his turns as Gollum and King Kong, the just-interred look is more apparent in the actor's whey-faced weaselyness than in the bucket-headed Dury but the impersonation goes much deeper than clock and clobber. Serkis inhabits his character physically such that the transformation in his voice seems to come from something more life-rupturing than mere manipulation of the vocal chords. Sure ,you get the charming loser and battling boozer who becomes a combination of Lear and his fool on stage, but if Dury had a tribute act - and some might say that the modern-day Blockheads with a revolving cast of celebrities in the lead role is just that - you'd expect and get nothing less. The key to the success of the film is unlocking the heart of the man on stage to see the shadow-plays staged there and how they informed the art and craft we are already familiar with through his archive of vinyl and celluloid.

Many biopics have no arc and no dynamic and rock biopics are generally those that struggle hardest to least effect. In part, that's because we are still too close to the practitioners of the now fading era of rock'n'roll to get perspective, to see the story in the pile of clippings and clips too easily amassed as research. Sight does not necessarily give insight. Dury was a student of Peter Blake at the RCA and taught at art colleges himself after graduation but didn't pursue that route, saying "I got good enough at art to realise I wasn't going to be very good." Not all film directors are able to undertake such self-criticism and the now usual route to the clapperboard of an apprenticeship commercials and pop videos is rarely the best preparation for the two hour treatment.

But also, as with our discussion of poets in the movies, a creative life is not necessarily the best source material for creativity, and in bad hands can just be an excuse for the sort of cut-and-paste treatment that all-too-often masquerades as rock biography or the thinly disguised adaptation of source materials that lazy dramatists claim as plays - they may have a willing audience and guarantee sales but don't merit serious attention beyond the fan base who'll fork out the ticket price for anything with the right name on the package. If I had the time and inclination, I'd digress into a few paragraphs denigrating the missed opportunities of past efforts and speculate on what future projects might best fit the movie format, but you can spare me that effort by doing the job yourself with a few mates down the pub.

In Dury's case, the writer Paul Viragh had more than most to work with. Central to the script is the son-of-the-father who becomes the father-to-the-son with all the complications of the paternal dynamic that tend to come with absence. Baxter Dury is now a musician himself, but in the film is portrayed as a boy old before his time who never grows up - literally, as Bil Milner is asked to act out almost a decade of his young life without aging more than a few weeks. But the bass drum beat of this kit is the mother rather than father figure. Dury's own features little in the movie but was the one constant of his childhood, the upper-middle class daughter of a doctor and Celtic bohemian Betty who raised him as much in Cornwall and Essex and whose role in his life is replicated by both his wife and girlfriend who are expected to shift gears from carer through creative foil to lover on Ian's whim.

Not that any disabled kid in fifties Britain grew up spoilt. Dury's education in the Chailey Heritage Craft School and Hospital really was one of hard knocks and always getting back up for more. Returning to the institution in the eighties to mark the Year of the Disabled, Dury wanted to give the pupils some of his spirit of rebellion but by then they had less to rebel against and his cripple pride anthem 'Spasticus Autisticus' seemed to many derogatory rather than celebratory, too twisted to ever become the 'I am Spartacus' of the raspberry ripple kind. Dury took his dark and bitter anger into Grammar school where, smaller but older than his classmates, he took out his rage on any that got in his way, a habit he perpetuated as band leader where even working partnerships with talents such as Chaz Jankel were riven with more tensions than creativity itself demanded.

The movie ends a decade before Lord Upminster's early death, sparing us the worst of his alcoholism, the degradations of liver cancer, the decline in his artistic abilities and output, and the pirate and villain film roles he took on to keep the money coming in - Dury is the only actor I can name who made films with both Bob Dylan and Tom Waits, and he turned down the 'opportunity' to work with Andrew Lloyd Webber on the libretto to 'Cats', missing out on Richard Stilgoe's millions - all hinted at, but not overdone in the closing scenes of the movie. Its faults are mainly stylistic. There is more pop art frippery than is strictly necessary to deliver the story and the framing device of Dury's narration from a stage beyond the grave only fills the gaps the script should have covered integrally. But it seems unlikely that rock music will deliver us another Dury and 'Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll' does a good job of telling us why.

Poetry, Theatre, Music - 'Village' with Josephine Larsen, Alice Oswald, Martin Holland and Peter Oswald

2010-01-24T15:33:00.000-08:00

For those of you who aren't regular readers - or listeners - we had Alice and Peter Oswald on The Blah Blah Blah Show in January to promote this pamphlet and its Exeter launch organised by my co-presenter Rachel McCarthy, accompanied by a well designed poster and programme that may prove to be as collectible as the signed chapbook many in the audience left clutching.

Alice Oswald's poetry will need no introduction to those who keep in touch with the contemporary scene. She had two collections - one a commission, the other a collaboration - published by Faber in 2009, adding to her previous three collections and the two anthologies which she has edited.

Her poem for several voices 'Mrs Eaves phones her sister' closes the pamphlet and closed last night's performance, but on this occasion she was one of a company of four, each making significant contributions to a performance that combined theatre, music and verse - sometimes in combination. That piece brought the four of them together and in its weaving of character and tongue, we were left with the strangeness of an English village in winter, its people as unpredictable as the weather.

Her husband Peter Oswald is best known as a dramatist - his plays have been performed at the Globe, the National Theatre and on Broadway - but the pamphlet 'Village' features seven of his poems, three read to us on during the evening. His work reminds me most of Weldon Kees - a compliment in my book. Given most of his drama is written in verse, it is no surprise he has a facility for rhyme and metre, but so subtle you hardly register it on first reading. His style is conversational - natural words in a natural order - but the tone is often dark - as dark as nature itself. 'Early morning hald asleep' reminded me of Kees' 'For My Daughter'. 'Cat' has an unassuming title but begins 'I'm walking through the rooms of my dead body...' a line as bleak as any Weldon came up with, and also has something of Kafka about it - the old officials on the landing, the almost empty statue room - that defies the merely domestic. 'Moonflight' is a sparser piece, aligning the trajectory of earth's satellite with man's journeys to it so effectively, I've found myself returning to it several times in the night/day/night since I first heard it.

Jospehine Larsen has a compelling presence and the ability to make each of the three short plays she starred in - alone in 'Pram', with Peter, their author, in 'Greenviolet' and 'Miss Bratty', stand alone in the memory of what was a compendium performance of fifteen parts. The latter provided light relief that shaded and shadowed what came before and after it and was both the lynch pin of the evening and the piece that seemed to owe least to those around it. Peter Oswald the ventriloquist, Josephine Larsen his dummy - the double act combined to speak to us of relationships, their breakdown, and being alone whilst being together in a way that was more Beckett than end-of-pier show but had more laughs than most variety acts.

I hadn't heard Martin Holland play before but will seek him out again. More than an accompanist, he was both the first and last on stage, whether in combination - his call-and-response with Alice on 'Interview with the Wind' could give jazz-poetry a good name - or solo, if that is the word for a musician with the talent, timing and facility to layer guitar and trumpet into compelling duets with himself, as in the opening 'Bossa Grrove Improvised' or the experimental 'Minor Loops'.

The drama studio at the Phoenix Arts Centre is an intimate space of forty seats - sold out in advance - that would benefit from more sympathetic lighting. What the evening gave practitioners - and aficionados - of all the genres featured was an example of how they can be combined to the enrichment of each other. Although featuring two poets, promoted as an evening of poetry, and launching a pamphlet of verse, it was perhaps that of the three art forms that was least dominant on the night, made-up for by subsequent reading on the page. Poetry is a quieter art form and while I'm the first to criticise extended commentary on poems in performance and admire brevity of both contextual and biographical introduction, something was needed to give them the prominence the writing deserved when up against the more immediate dramatic and musical forms.

That said, 'The Attention Seekers' have devised a format with legs - eight of them - that deserves wider exposure and a larger audience. With little refinement, they have a show that could tour arts centres and, with the right promotion, attract a paying crowd without diluting artistic intent. Considerable effort clearly went into preparing this performance and I hope it is one of many, a memory to repeat and not just cherish. For those organising literature festivals, it would make a fine revue to breakup the procession of talking heads with an hour or so that manages to be both entertaining and accomplished, its heterogeneity a welcome antidote to more homogeneous formats, but its content consistently of the highest quality.

I am also pleased to note that Alice and Peter intend 'Village' to be the first of several pamphlets in the Chiquita Books of Dartington imprint that will range across written art forms. The chapbook format lends itself to experiment, but in this instance it is far from disposable. Let's hope they maintain the quality, while delivering on their promise of diversity.

Cinema: Up in the Air

2010-01-24T13:16:00.000-08:00

'Up in the Air'

What if you desire to live in transit, tied to nothing, nowhere and nobody? In this Jason Reitman ('Juno', 'Thank You for Giving Up Smoking') adaptation of Walter Kirn's novel of the same name, George Clooney plays a corporate downsizer who lives his life in airport lounges, hotel rooms and identikit meeting rooms, laying off workers whose bosses are too timid to do the deed themselves. He also has a sideline in selling his philosophy of life - keep your backpack below cabin size, travel light through life - to those same bosses who like to attend motivational sessions to escape the monotonous grind of their managerial responsibilities. Unlike them, he practices what he preaches.

For girls who love Clooney, you need not fear he's had to sacrifice some of his trademark charm to play Ryan Bingham, this lone wolf of the skies. He might be a shark, not a swan, but it's Clooney's cross-gender sex appeal that enables us to empathise with a man who most of us wouldn't ordinarily spend two hours in the company of voluntarily. I can think of no other actor alive who could've carried this film, and it is a film worth carrying, having elements of romantic comedy - more thorns than rose - but tackling the economic downturn in a way that both both provokes and entertains.

The other key roles in the movie are female, and all well played: whether his occasional lover (like him, 'but with a vagina', one with surprising offspring) Alex (Vera Farmiga); his ingenue sidekick Natalie (Anna Kendrick) who threatens his ambition of being the seventh and youngest man to clock up ten million air miles by revolutionising the recession's most successful industry with dismissal by webcam (she gets dumped by txt and changes her life as a consequence, but not before disrupting Bingham's ever changing, never changing routine); or his two sisters Kara (Amy Morton) and Julie (Melanie Lynskey), the latter on the verge of marriage, so long as Bingham steps in and does the elder brotherly thing, one of life's many roles he's not accustomed to fulfilling, turning his gift of the gab against his own philosophy.

But many of the film's funniest and most moving moments come not from the central and professional cast but through scenes involving, and interviews with, those who've recently lost their jobs in real life. These talking heads were plucked from the dole queues to share their experiences, each unique but somehow universal. It is them that elevate standard rom-com fare into a state-of-the nation movie. Filmed mainly in St Louis but set in the airport cities of several states across the union, aerial shots give you a sense of this county that is a continent, while what's going on on the ground is indicative of the times we're still living through and hints at the individual actions that ,when accumulated, were the cause of our current economic malaise.

You can see where this is going - the man who's spent all his life avoiding connections, let alone commitments, begins to have them forced upon him, then discovers that maybe that's what he's wanted all -along - but only maybe. He is after all touchingly loyal - he's worked many years for a single corporation, flies with one airline, sticks with a favourite hotel chain, only drives the cars of one hire car firm and has the gold, platinum and graphite cards to prove it. He packs the same way for every trip, has a home more functional and less personal than the rooms-for-hire he spends the majority of his nights in, and believes dressing casually is removing one's tie - everything you hate about business travel, that's why he loves it so.

When he confronts the departure board at the end of the film and watches his life flip over before him, all and yet nothing has changed. If our best moments are spent in the company of those we love and are loved by, we are left with uncertainty - maybe it's too late to put that lesson into action for a man like Bingham, so set in his ways that for him perhaps life really is a solo journey, made without the security of a co-pilot and ending at the destination we're all flying towards so rapidly.

Poetry: Tim Allen at Uncut Poets, Exeter Phoenix - Thursday January 28th 2010

2010-01-20T13:47:00.000-08:00

Tim Allen is guest poet at Exeter's Uncut Poets at the Phoenix Arts Centre this month on Thursday January 28th at 7.30pm in the Black Box - £5 (£3 concessions and readers).

Uncut Poets is presented by Tony Frazer, editor of Shearsman Books, and James Bell, published by tall-lighthouse. In an evening of two halves, sets from the guest are preceded by five open mike slots - to book call James on 07879 888319.

Tim Allen is a poetry activist and provocateur. Founder of the much-missed poetry magazine Terrible Work, Spineless Press and Plymouth's The Language Club he has been a catalyst in the south-west's poetry scene for many years and many local writers owe a great deal to his challenge and support, his friendship and enmity. He is a critic in the truest sense - he has opinions, expresses them and justifies them by example and by argument. He may not have written more reviews than anyone alive, but he has written more than any man I know, and when you read what he has to say, you know his motive has integrity, is not a means to some other end.

He takes sides, and that is because poetry matters to him. I disagree with him as much as I agree with him - more often, probably - but that is why he is worth reading, should be listened to. His analysis of the contemporary poetry scene is informed and thought through. He is acute on the dynamics of poetry publishing, and engages with movements in literature as others might with political ideologies. Indeed, to him, writing is an expression of personal politics; aesthetics has an ethical dimension.

This comes through in his own writing, and he cherishes negative reaction as much as he enjoys positive response. His performances don't compromise or shape themselves to the tastes of his audience and this is exciting - you confront and are confronted by another mind at work, electricity surging through its own circuits, as likely to trip you out as light up a bulb inside. He is also smaller than me, which is reassuring - if he outwits me, I know I can always lamp him one.

To learn more about Tim and his work try the following links:

Shearsman Author Page

'Settings'

Review of 'Settings' in Stride Magazine

Buy from Amazon

Salt Author Page

'Don't Start Me Talking: Interviews With Contemporary Poets' co-edited with Andrew Duncan

Review of 'Don't Start Me Talking' in Stride Magazine

Buy from Amazon

'Swindon Switches On' in Brink

Interview in The Argotist Online

And interviewing Tony Frazer

Plymouth's The Language Club

Guests January 2010: Alice Oswald and Peter Oswald

2010-01-14T13:23:00.000-08:00

When we pitched The Blah Blah Blah Show to Phonic FM, they were looking for more spoken word content, we were looking to establish an arts magazine radio show that respected its guests and their work but would fit into what is primarily an albeit eclectic music station.

We have recorded and hope to make available all of our interviews with guests who are selected for having a south-west connection and being genuine practitioners of the art forms we focus on - literature, cinema, visual arts and theatre.

In the mean time, I'll catch-up by making a posting on each of our guests so far, not attempting to summarise their careers - or our interviews - myself but by providing links to other material on the internet we accessed in preparing for our conversation, enabling curious listeners and readers to explore further.

Peter Oswald and Alice Oswald are based in - and committed to - Devon but have an international reputation. Whilst they are widely acknowledged in their own fields - theatre and poetry respectively - they are increasingly collaborating in their work - sometimes with each other - and exploring where these and other forms meet.

Their appearance on our show precedes an evening in the Phoenix Arts Centre, Exeter on 23rd January when they will be reading from their new pamphlet 'Village' - featuring eight poems by Peter and one longer piece for several voices by Alice - performing with their ensemble 'The Attention Seekers' with trumpet played by Martin Holland and previewing three short plays with members of Hearts Tongue Theatre.

Details are now posted on Rachel McCarthy's website and have been sent out to the ExCite contacts list which you can join by emailing your details to stanza at rachelmccarthy dot com

Peter Oswald is due to perform 'Birdsongs' with Hugh Nankivell at Dartington on 14th January.

Alice Oswald is on the shortlist for the T.S.Eliot Award for her book 'Weeds and Wildflowers.' The winner is announced on January 18th.

She hosts regular poetry evenings at the Sharpham Centre.

'Village' by Peter Oswald and Alice Oswald is available from Word Power Books for £3.00

ALICE OSWALD

Career resume
Faber Author's Page
Books on Amazon
Independent feature
Observer feature
Telegraph review
Poetry Society feature
Shearsman review
Observer review
Tower review

PETER OSWALD

Career resume
Poetry blog
Books on Amazon
Play database
Guardian interview
The Golden Ass
The Storm review
Lucifer Saved
The Ramayana
Heart's Tongue past projects

Cinema: Avatar - 1D in 3D?

2010-01-14T12:15:00.000-08:00

Avatar

I don't usually do event cinema. It's not that I'm a misanthrope. I like people, I just don't like to be among them watching a movie. Maybe it's why I prefer obscure foreign language films in back street art houses at odd hours of the day. It's the nose bags of popcorn that do it, the troughs of ice cream - I just can't concentrate with all that scoffing going on in my peripheral vision.

Avatar is a foreign language film. Much of its dialogue is in Na'vi - the tongue of the ten foot blue aliens that are the heroes of a plot that turns the old cowboy flick on its head and gets you rooting for the Indians. It's easy on the ear and is already more developed than Klingon - your friends will be speaking it at dinner parties next week, thrashing around their long blue tails.

It is also so beautifully visually realised, some among the millions who've spent 160 minutes in its 3D world have been depressed ever since, yearning to get back. No wonder many return to reimmerse themselves in its phosphorescent deep forest setting. If you've seen 3D film before, you'll be expecting all the scenes that show off its technology - the chases and battle scenes - but this is the first time I've sat back and pleasured myself on pure visuals. In the quieter moments of the movie you suddenly realise that you feel the close confinement os space travel or a science lab, and that's before we've even entered into a foreign body on an alien world when the adventure really begins.

There are two kinds of Sci Fi fans: the freaks who read books in their own private worlds and the geeks who watch films and attend conventions in costume. As a kid I read plenty of space opera and fantasy novels, but was deprived of video or cinema, never even seeing a Star Wars film, which makes me a bedroom freak, with only a record player for company. There's not enough going on upstairs for you Philip K. Dick lovers. You might see Pandora in your dreams but your brain matterwon't be troubled too much. This is one for the Trekkies and Jedi but it's also girl-friendly enough for the geeks to take their mums to.

All surface, some feeling, what meaning? If you don't expect anything other than a join-the-dots plot then you won't be disappointed. The crippled marine who becomes the na'vi super-being is standard hero material, and after his wheelchair entry he's blessed with very long and flexible legs. There's a star-crossed lovers storyline that will be familiar enough to anyone who's watched James Cameron's Titanic, not that I have - that was released in 1997 and he's been working on this ever since, although two sequels are on the way to capitalise on the investment. This film - its spin-offs, products and sequels - will keep the industry buoyant for some years to come. And there's no point in seeing it on the small screen - its a must-see movie theatre 3D experience.

Although this could have only been made in Hollywood, it has a subtext that is riling the American and Christian right. With the USA still fighting two wars on foreign shores, it's not short of innuendo about neo-colonialism. Although the marines of the movie are mercenaries in corporate employment, their flag is no less the Stars-and-Stripes than that of the East Indies Company was the Union Jack. The human heroes, whether in their own bodies or in Na'vi incarnation, are US citizens too of course, but its those big blue tree hugging hippies that are the good guys - if they're American, they're native and pre-Colombian. And if Avatar the movie has wound up both Fox News and the Vatican, James Cameron must be doing something right. That commie bastard is probably a Canadian.

As for those bad boys in the green berets - robot suits and gunship space choppers - greed is their motive, cultural awareness not their strong suit and spiritual sensitivity entirely absent from their jar-like heads. Mean time, the alien folk are so tuned in to their environment and each other you could be in Totnes. The capitalism vs the jungle plot is reminiscent of The Emerald Forest but while in that eighties Brazilian braves versus bozos in bulldozers version the good guys could only lose, on Pandora they win and send the marines home without the hoard of precious energy-giving metal they'd come for. Damn, I've given the ending away - but then you'd guessed it already hadn't you? Let's hope in part two Uncle Sam returns to nuke the place. Or Pat Robertson curses them voodoo blue zombies with a Richter 7.3 earthquake. That'll shake them Satan suckers out of their sacred tree.

Cinema: The Road

2010-01-09T13:37:00.000-08:00

The Road

Every generation gets the apocalypse it deserves; when it comes to its realisation in the arts, that is. Back in the eighties when I was tramping the streets beneath a banner made of broom handles and a sheet, it was nuclear war that had us on the edge of our seats. You'll be pleased to know the demonstrations were successful and nuclear war never happened.

Environmental apocalypse is the disaster movie du jour, although cinematic license is required; a slow-warming or cooling world not having the impact on screen atom bombs have. As a consequence, recent efforts have either had to accelerate the science or keep matters vague, 'The Road' pursuing the latter strategy in book - written by Cormac McCarthy - and on screen. You know that something bad has happened - everything and almost everyone is dead, trees are dead in the earth, conflagrations are spontaneous and the horizon wreathed with smoke - you're just not quite sure what exactly. Whatever it was, it's left a landscape so devastated it could only be filmed in Pittsburgh and New Orleans in a palette of ash greys, char blacks and dirt browns.

My generation was so hitched to the bride of the apocalypse, we played role-playing games in which we imagined ourselves as post-war survivors, our only objective to keep our alter egos alive as we raided ruined supermarkets for food, seeing off mutoid gangs of desperadoes, or attempted to set-up a fortified homestead and grow us a living in the wasteland in which we found ourselves. The man and boy of the story pursue the roaming route to survival - homesteaders rear their meat human; a single dog has survived the great whatever; there is not a bird in the sky or rodent alive - and this gives the movie its momentum. The flashbacks distract rather than enlighten, man haunted by wife who stepped out into the cold, abandoning both to a life of death. What matters is the journey south - the reverse direction of travel for the desperate of the contemporary Americas - although most viewers will harbour a hunch from the start that what they find there may not be worth the effort of dragging their skin, bones and shopping trolleys down the abandoned highways that stretch between one grim scenario and another all the way to the blankness of the ocean.

Let me be frank: I am as childless as the boy is friendless for most of the film. The prospect of roaming a barren post-apocalypse landscape alone is almost tolerable to those of us who romance the dark side: with a young son in tow - sometimes literally - the congealing of love and dread with tumours and gangrene would be too much to bear. But I have lived with children and witnessed the parental instinct at close quarters: wires previously barely powered becoming the mainline of life. And it is the relationship between man and boy that propels this film and holds the attention, no matter what trials are thrown its way by that vindictive God of the Old Testament who licked his chops on Job. 'I'll kill anyone who touches you - that's my job,' the patriarch says, and the son trembles like Isaac.

Yes, man lives but humanity has died. In such extremes, is anyone still a good guy? The only moral dividing line the movie could draw was in separating those who had eaten human flesh from those who were still resisting that temptation. Living our everyday lives, we prefer not to contemplate how interdependent our lives have become; how little it might take to knock the blocks from under civilisation. If in 'The Road' the why is never explained, it doesn't matter: the what has bled trust from the world, except from those with blood ties, father bound to son. The sudden death of the former takes even those who know what's coming by surprise; his replacement by a wandering nuclear family, fulfilling boy's need for child and canine friends, is a little too convenient to contain even emotional truth.

I read the book stranded overnight in an American airport with fourteen members of my family. In the USA, when something goes wrong, you're on your own. Witness New Orleans and then look away. Compare hurricane procedures there with those employed by the ideological enemy just across the water and you'll see the different value sets at play. Obama has his work cut out, turning a country round in which a substantial minority consider the ideals of universal healthcare unholy, immoral and anti-American while a good number of their poorer immediate neighbours suffer worse outcomes than many in the developing world south of the border.

This is an American movie. The cult of survivalism is more marked there than elsewhere, millenarian tensions persisting while beyond the turn of the last century, many a back-woodsman still drunk on the hot toddy of Revelations-based evangelism and shoot-thy-trespassing-neighbour commandment today. Even I found the book a little too bleak and starkly written to get under my imagination. The movie has its haunting moments, but I never entered its world as it required me to do. Perhaps it was the voiceover and soundtrack, maybe the digressions into flashback, but white noise got in the way of the silent contemplation that might have stranded me there. I am a purveyor of words and a lover of music but when it comes to cinema of the post-apocalypse, it turns out I'm a purist. When the End Times come, God will sort the men from the boys, without the prose of McCarthy providing running commentary or the piano and violin of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis to serenade us to our fates on Judgement Day.

Poetry: Elisabeth Blestsoe

2010-01-03T12:48:00.000-08:00

I'm delighted to hear that Shearsman Books will be publishing a comprehensive selection of the earlier works of Elisabeth Bletsoe later this month under the title 'Pharmacopoeia and Early Selected Works' bringing back into print all of 'Pharmacopoeia' (Odyssey/Terrible Work), selections from 'The Regardians' (Odyssey) and 'Portraits of the Artist's Sister' (Odyssey), and some miscellaneous poems.

You can find further details on the Shearsman site, together with more information on her 2008 collection 'Landscape from a Dream'.

We'll endeavour to get Elisabeth on The Blah Blah Blah Show at some future date, but in the mean time, an audo recording of her reading 'The Seperable Soul' is available on the 'Gists and Piths' blog.

To mark this reprinting of Elisabeth's earlier work, I'm reproducing my 1996 essay on her poetry, first published in the now sadly defunct 'Poetry Quarterly Review' to coincide with the publication of the first edition of 'Pharmacopoeia'.

GARDENS OF EARTH AND LIGHT

The Poetry of Elisabeth Bletsoe

In his novel Love and Death on Long Island Gilbert Adair's central character writes a history of the representation of angels in the arts, its premise being that only by aspiration to and concourse with some form of the super-natural is the artist able to create out of the humility that is, or should be, his natural state and essence. So it is with THE REGARDIANS. Strong poetry doesn't just respectfully copy the way things are, it creates. It can make and unmake the very gods themselves, but only because it comes from the silence beyond the ego monkey's jabbering.

Last year the New York Times best-sellers list featured more angels than the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Christian fundamentalists were as keen to tell us of their guardians as supposed abductees their alien consorts. In this country comparable 'literature' is more likely to be infected with new age whimsy. THE REGARDIANS is different. Bletsoe's angels are not ethereal beings, nor do they confine themselves to airy realms or deal in the empyreal. Far from ,cynical paganism', self-righteous evangelism and the Aquarian pick-and-mix; she is a Quaker and steeped in the traditions of English nonconformism. Hence the intention is as much political as spiritual. The millenarian hard rain nightmare of The Cloudseeder features Uriel the fire of God, connecting the Revelations-inspired visionaries of the late Middle Ages with latterday environmental apocalyptics, giving us a Dantean view of the cityscape of Cardiff. In The 'Oary Man Gabriel is seen in his role as heavenly ambassador, invoked by Gerard Winstanley in the founding of the Digger movement:

thrust into consciousness

by the radical English dreamers

who claimed your authority:

the Fiery Roll inscribed with blueprints

for a world

turned upside-down

It is a work of invocations, less prayers than active summonings of the human powers the angels represent into her consciousness and that of humanity at large. Thus, Archangelis and Lachrimatory draw on the mythologies of patriarchal religion (Bletsoe especially makes use of Jewish angelologies, later adopted by Christians and Muslims just as the Jews appropriated the gods of neighbouring nations and tribes into their heavenly hierarchies) only to undermine them: the dark energies of Michael and Cassiel summoned to recharge the female spirit more through opposition than identification, a vision of the weighers of souls, detached voyeurs in the guise of God's civil servants who know:

Heaven and Hell are the same place

all the suppressed beatings

of your enshrouded heart

cannot disguise

your secret joy

in failing

Similarly, Azrael triggers a cut-up of headlines from organs of the death culture: numbed to genuine experience of mortality we have no respect for life. The range of reference is sometimes astonishing but it is mutated into a strain of the language virus previously undetected: lain Sinclair meets the King James Bible. Infectious.

Bletsoe works in projects rather than poems. PORTRAITS OF THE ARTIST'S SISTER (published after, but written before, THE REGARDIANS) has a thematic unity, developing female 'mood-states' and 'life-situations' out of the paintings of Edvard Munch. It is a sequence meant to be read as a whole as his Frieze of Life paintings were meant to be viewed in one exhibition, each one note in the cumulative symphony. Munch is a poet's painter who thought in literary terms, sketching out his poem of love, life and death in words long before he recreated them in figurative art. Like Munch, Bletsoe writes out of her psyche rather than about it, employing a method that transcends autobiography while drawing on, at times, almost physiological memories- In the subconscious, Jung theorised, what is specifically personal is experienced in imagery we hold in common, in archetypes. With her knowledge of mythology and the contexts that generate their changing forms, mythmaking becomes reflective. The book takes the form of an archetypal journey, towards individuation and, in the macrocosm, sexual harmony, but in the language of human experience rather than psycho-babble. Moonlight is a fulcrum point in the book, fear turning to acceptance:

the wounded healer at the crossroads

opening the portals to a second life

loosely shrouded in delicious white

not a ghost, but a Sister

she sails her broken eggshells

over an ocean of night

It works almost like a series of mystery plays, the paintings tableaux: the stage-like simplicity of the settings and sometimes theatrical exaggeration of the postures of Munch's women become frames in the storyboard that Bletsoe fills out. If the work depended on an intimate knowledge of the paintings it would be problematic: like the printed text of an unseen movie (Brian Hinton) verbal commentaries on visual media rarely work. However, adopting the personae of Munch's subjects enables an investigation of not just the artist-model relationship, but also that of the observer and observed, on many levels. The poems have grown out of her relationship with the pictures. Whether we agree with her interpretation of Munch as being unusually attuned to the feminine (in the context of the nineteenth century, Presbyterian Scandinavia as depicted in, for example, the plays of Ibsen and Strindberg), her giving the voiceless a voice is what matters. Rather than trying to describe the spatial economy, contrastive colouring and sketchy rendering of the paintings she adopts their poetic equivalents: the prevailing tones of summer nocturnals conjured by her lunar idiom. As Munch was a great painter, so Bletsoe, also, is a great poet of the night. Dreams within dreams, where boundaries between mortality and the immortal, fact and imagination, are thin, as in the Madonna section of The Lady with the Brooch:

in her mouth's corner a spectre of death

in her two lips the joy of life

PORTRAITS... is an examination of repression, the power it generates and the possibility of channelling that power, using the vampire myth, for example, as an externalisation of the other within to enable surrender to it. It admits grief as a positive process, the deep awareness of mortality developing maturity, a prelude and inducement to transcendence. And within all of this inner alchemy, it is the women - a fearful girl at puberty, the tragi-comedy of a doomed affair in Ashes, watching the hands and skin of The Dead Mother - that put flesh on the spirit work and give it life.

PHARMACOPOEIA, shortly to be published, is a slim, interim pamphlet that elusively and allusively tells the story of a relationship in moments, each marked by a particular flower in a particular landscape. It veers from despair to fulfilment as if a love potion had been prepared along the course of the interlinked journeys. Bletsoe is a ruthless crafter of language which is here pared down so that the poems are almost tinctures. In emotional biography less is always more and what is omitted more telling than what is said. The language is restrained, almost academic at times, such that the occasional personal statement feels like the eyes of lovers meeting in the incendiary field that we lie down in & fall into the sky.

Elisabeth is a herbalist (Pharmacopoeia means a list of medical ingredients, including instructions on their preparation and use) and the text is challenging to the botanically illiterate, intercutting pieces from ancient herbals, folklore etc. However, even in this, both her slimmest and most difficult work, the characteristic features of her distinctive method are maintained.

She displays an almost Japanese discipline of concrete description and restraint, each piece a string of beautiful haiku-like beads. The way the text is laid out like a musical score hints at the breath patterns she achieves in performance, enabling the reader to recreate them in her own voice. (The use of space on the page is an additional visual aesthetic.) Form is defined not by rules but intention, discovered in the act of writing: ripples on the silence it emerges from. The poem as journey, inner and outer, such that the subject and reader are changed by its conclusion and given the impetus to reach it. Above all it is the sense of absolute commitment to her role as receiver/ transmitter that gives the intensity of Poetry as magic or medicine; not for mirroring but manifestation. (Sarah Hopkins).

We are also faced with a concentration that might put off the casual reader: the depth of reference, lexical range; a density of expression not found in the currently prevalent modes of social realism and autotherapy. But surely even the uncommitted will feel its tensions, be captured by its sound and rhythm and enter inner labyrinths where the heart does the thinking and the head begins to feel: nothing is stated, none of her immense and wide-ranging knowledge is made use of, unless it is also felt.

OOSER, still in progress, takes Bletsoe home to Dorset, and populates its landscape with the marginalised and dispossessed: the villagers of Tyneham, the Tolpuddle martyrs... Those poems already published in magazines¹ reinhabit some of the women of Thomas Hardy's novels and empower them with a sexuality he could only allude to given the strictures of the late Victorian novel. In opposition to Virginia Woolf's view that he makes them the weaker and the fleshlier... clinging to the stronger (man) and obscuring their vision she finds an openness to the feminine principle, not just in the eroticisation of the other but a genuine empathy with the sufferings of a sex caught in the double-bind of nineteenth century sexual hypocrisy. She takes the tragedies of their situations and makes them celebrations of a latent power:

neither life or death dilute me:

out of suffering may come the cure

The Ooser itself was a fertility idol co-opted into Christian festivals and bastardised as the devil. Evolving out of a British tradition of horned fertility gods going back 10,000 years it was transformed into a figure of terror, haunting sexual miscreants in skimmity rides and giving evil a face in mumming. Its last authentic Dorset representation was sold to America. A crude reproduction now amuses tourists in local Morris dances. It is about to refind its voice.

In her fine poem, Poetry, Marianne Moore longs for ‘literalists of the imagination’ who ....can present / for inspection, 'imaginary gardens with real toads in them'.

Enjoy the gardens. Beware the toads.

¹ Rainbarrows (ODYSSEY #18)

Cross-in-Hand (TERRIBLE WORK #5)

PQR SPRING 1996

Playlist: January 2010

2010-01-03T11:46:00.000-08:00

Those of you listening in to today's show might have guessed I was responsible for the playlist as well as operating the sound desk today. No, that's not me - or Rachel - in the picture, it's Lex from the Ben and Lex Show (alternative Thursdays 20.00-22.00); it's not even the current studio setup, but it gives you an idea of what's happening behind the scenes.

1. 'Working Man's Blues Number 2' by Bob Dylan off Modern Times

Fulfilling my pledge to you the listener to play a Bob Dylan track every show whether Rachel likes it or not I got him in early again this month. Why 'boots and shoes'? A bluesman had two pairs of footwear, one for stage and one for the street. See also 'suit and clothes'. Why 'Number 2'? Because Merle Haggard got their first, although there are few similarities in the songs beyond title and theme.

2. 'Hope There's Someone' by Antony and the Johnsons off 'I'm a Bird Now'

When I first heard that voice - singing in Lou Reed's band, alongside a practitioner of Tai Chi performing Tai Chi - I almost fell off my chair.

3. 'The Blower's Daughter' by Damien Rice off 'The Story of O'

Another spine tingler. With two great writers - Alice and Peter Oswald - being interviewed on the programme, we didn't want the music to get in the way, but we also wanted to give everyone some breathing space to consider what they'd just heard - the listener - or what was to be discussed next - in the studio. This was the theme song to the movie 'Closer', hence the video footage.

4. 'Sea Song' by Rachel Unthank and the Winterset off 'The Bairns'

Written by Robert Wyatt, but sung by The Unthanks (they changed their name on the release of their latest album), the youtube video I've linked to appears to have been shot by a dwarf in the front row looking up at a very high stage; it's nice to see a gig from that perspective, I normally suffer people poking me in the back asking me if I wouldn't mind unscrewing my head.

5. 'Heroes and Villains' by Brian Wilson off 'Smile'

Hearing Peter Oswald discuss the similarities between the human voice and the trumpet, I rummaged in my bag for a trumpet led track and came up short. There is trumpet in this track somewhere - Brian Wilson's recreation of the 'Smile' album forty years after its abandonment - but there's also the kitchen sink and sand box. If you've not seen the live show, I recommend the Royal Festival Hall video.

6. 'House of Cards' by Radiohead off 'In Rainbows'

I like to tell anyone who's prepared to listen that 'In Rainbows' is the best album released last decade, and that's from someone who rarely plays another Radiohead album, although their 1997 Glastonbury headlining appearance is also a special memory. You should seek out the CD of outtakes that was included only with the deluxe version of this record by whatever means necessary - it's an essential companion piece of similar quality to the album itself.

7. 'A Minor Place' by Bonnie 'Prince' Billy off 'I See a Darkness'

Also covered by The Unthanks - we don't just throw CDs into a bag and haul them out at random you know - the equally fine title track of this album was recorded by Johnny Cash and would be the perfect accompaniment to the credits of the forthcoming 'The Road' movie we previewed today. I trust in Nick Cave and Warren Ellis to come up with something similarly bleak and haunting.

8. 'White Socks/Flip Flops' by Super Furry Animals off 'Dark Days/Light Years'

The Phonic FM studio is so hot, we wear flip flops, Hawaiian shirts and Bermuda shorts to present every show - but never white socks. Modern pop psychedelia at it's finest.

9. 'To Ohio' by 'The Low Anthem' off 'Oh my God, Charlie Darwin'

The best debut of 2009? I think so, not that they've got much competition on my shelves.

Was that all we played? Don't ask me, I'm only the janitor. There are probably CDs all over the studio floor again, waiting for those Blah Blah Blah buggers to come back to collect them.

Poetry: Recommendations from 2009 (6 of 6) Kenny Knight 'The Honicknowle Book of the Dead'

2010-01-02T11:53:00.001-08:00

'The Honicknowle Book of the Dead' by Kenny Knight

Some poets invent their own language, others their own reputation, but Kenny Knight has created his own world. It exists in parallel to ours and the only portal to it can be found in Buckingham Shed at an undisclosed location in Honicknowle, Plymouth, Devon, England. Kenny has been sending us poetic missives from that parallel world now for some time and finally they've been collected together by Shearsman Books.

I recently visited Bhutia Busty Gompa in Darjeeling in the Himalaya where the original of the Tibetan Book of the Dead is stored in strips of parchment bound by wood. I presented the abbot of the monastery with our own culture's Book of the Dead in more convenient paperback form. The monk looked Kenny's picture in the eye for a long time before whispering important words in my ear. I can tell you what he told me then - that Kenny Knight is a bodhisattva, the second Plymothian to be recognised as a reincarnated lama, following in the footsteps of the Lobsang Rampa, born Cyril Henry Hoskin, a West country plumber whose own third eye opened around the time Kenny was born. And that concurrence is probably not a coincidence.

Like Cyril, Kenny had no need to leave Plymouth to reach enlightenment, it came to him at a bus stop on Honicknowle Green. Since then, Kenny has been sharing his findings from that parallel reality with us by publishing them in occasional poetry magazines and reading to unsuspecting audiences in supermarket cafes and public libraries. And the people respond to what they hear, because they recognise themselves in his work, and realise that their lives are more mysterious and more compelling than they previously believed - that they can achieve enlightenment too - maybe in the local Pound Shop, possibly on a park bench, potentially in Buckingham Shed, if only they could find it and hear the music of its fabled Collective.

Kenny does deadpan delivery better than anybody. His voice is on the page; you can hear it, even if you haven't heard it. The tone is conversational - a conversation you want to have - but despite the jumps in time, space, dimension and focus - no intrusion is unwelcome and no line wasted. Everything is linked to everything else and because something in your life will have something in common with something in Kenny's life, every single one of us is linked to Kenny Knight. Whether we like it or not.

Time is fluid, but folds in on itself sometime in 1963. Honicknowle becomes a mandala for the wider universe, and each event that occurs there takes on special significance: pouring the tea is a tea ceremony, joining a queue is a religious observance, going to school is like walking from one body into another, teddy bears are great teachers, a trip round the block is equivalent to a voyage round the world and the afterlife turns out to be the before life - in a terraced house on the Honnicknowle Hills. An autobiography in verse is the last thing that should be written; if one is written, it is the last thing you should read; for this re-imagining of a life story, make an exception. Once the donkey's bitten you, he won't let go.

Kenny Knight will be appearing on The Blah Blah Blah Show on Phonic FM on February 7th 2010 at noon.