I’ll say the people holding it

days x mice

Belles journées, souris du temps,
Vous rongez peu à peu ma vie.
Dieu! Je vais avoir vingt-huit ans,
Et mal vécus, à mon envie.

from Le Bestiaire, Guillaume Apollinaire 1911

Holidays Vocabulary on Resonance fm

Tomorrow afternoon’s Digestives broadcast on Resonance FM is Holidays Vocabulary, a new work of mine based on the sound files I unearthed on an old dictaphone of mine last month. It’s an experiment in translation.

Holidays Vocabulary airs tomorrow at 4:30pm and is repeated this Friday at 7:30pm, and you can listen by clicking the ‘Listen Now’ mp3 stream at www.resonancefm.com, or tune in to 104.4fm inside London. Afterwards it will be available to download as a podcast at www.antepress.co.uk.

Holidays Vocabulary

I made this in 2005 and I found it again the other day. Though I’m not meant to be working this month I’m surreptitiously preparing it for a Resonance fm broadcast, to be aired on September 21 as part of Digestives.

Singing

This is a departure.

Cooking in a Bedsitter

I bought a second-hand book on Saturday called Cooking in a Bedsitter. (The plan was to mark it up like Language in the Modern World but it isn’t quite suited after all.) I don’t live in a bedsitter now, but I used to, and I used to relish the solitariness and the makeshiftness of everything. It was one room, and in the corner of it was a sink with one working tap (the hot tap, which only ran cold) and a very bad immersion heater above it which ran either cold or steamingly, hand-scaldingly hot. Next to the sink on a knee-high table was an unhappy baby belling, and next to that on the floor an indifferent fridge.

Jem Finer Lighthouse/Piano/Harp

When I was at art school I spent a week at Trinity Buoy Wharf making some really bad site specific art which was then exhibited along with everyone else’s site specific art. (I also took lots of video, sitting in a boat I wasn’t sure I was allowed to be in, watching a piece of cord swaying obliquely, I must find that and see what it’s like.)

In the lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf there are some outdated computers playing a piece of music which is 1000 years long, and on the 31st December 2999 it will start playing again at the beginning.

Yesterday Anton showed me a video of a piano performance by Jem Finer, and afterwards I realised he was the same man who’d made Longplayer.

Framing Matter

He walked back to the dresser, opened the lower part of it, and took out a little chest till he put it on the table for my inspection. [...]

‘I will tell you a story and give you a synopsis of the ramification of the little plot,’ he said. ‘When I had the chest made and finished, I tried to think what I would keep in it ans what I would use it for at all. First I thought of them letters from Bridie, the ones on the blue paper with the strong smell but I did not think it would be anything but a sacrilege in the end because there was hot bits in them letters. Do you comprehend the trend of my observations?’

‘I do,’ I answered.

‘Then there was my studs and the enamel badge and my presentation iron-pencil with a screw on the end of it to push the point out, an intricate article full of machinery and a Present from Southport. All these things are what are called Examples of the Machine Age.’

Inkpen

I am in Inkpen, which some people think is an invented place because of its name. It’s actually real, but not entirely, because I grew up here and so there are bits of past places and projects and plans all over the place, floating in the air invisibly, and sometimes you walk into them and get them all over your face and in your mouth like spiderwebs.

And the inclinations and aptitudes of my parents have meant corridors and rooms and staircases and doorways have been growing and reducing and exchanging places since before I was born. If we drew out a new floor plan on tracing paper each time something changed, we could pile them up and have a mess of rooms and walls and gaps, and it’d be difficult to mark the spiderwebs on.

Still the same old broom

In a tutorial just before the end of term I talked about wanting to return to my “What To Do” talk to perfect it now, even though it was written and performed between May and July this year. We discussed what it would mean to go back to the work several months later and make adjustments on the basis of my current judgements, and whether it would mean I’m perfecting the original work or changing it into a new one – and whether the distinction matters. Presumably if returning to an old work means changing it into a new one, then we might ultimately think of keeping hold of one single work and continuing to ‘perfect’ it over a lifetime. (Like the joke about a broom lasting centuries as long as its components are frequently replaced.)