Like an online zine. About things I hear, things I see, things I read, and things I learn. Adding a few more musings to the muddled morass that is the internet.
In one of those funny little twists of fate my attention has been drawn to artist Luke Jerram's work from two directions recently.
Firstly - he is the artist whose ongoing touring work "Play Me, I'm Yours!" currently has 50 Golden Street Pianos dotted around London.
How could I not love this live-art intervention? As a pianist the invitation is enough. Play me, I'm yours! How liberating. I don't have to be Lil Armstrong or Mitsuko Uchida to play one. They're ours and we can all play them whether we're not a piano player at all or we're a great concert pianist. It's heady just thinking about it.
I'm am spending some time seeking them out and playing them. I've played two so far. I love the way it subtly transforms the urban space. On one level, while you're playing, London churns by. People ignore you, slow to take a look, stop to listen & take a picture. I especially enjoyed playing the one in Reuters Plaza, Canary Wharf. This little gold painted piano, underneath a tree, dwarfed by the forbidding glass surfaces of the towers of mordor capitalism. Music being made by anybody who wants to make it. From the little kid just exploring the sounds the piano makes, through me (middling, returning to playing after taking a long break because I thought I wasn't good enough), to the virtuoso playing rippling 19th century music. In Canary Wharf, anyway, it's this little, free, transient, human thing that's been snuck in among the banking skyscrapers and the shopping malls. It whispers softly that there might be another way...
There is even a piano on Parliament Hill, Hampstead Heath. I very much want to play this piano as my friend Andy's ashes were scattered there. It's a place that means a lot to me. Even though he's been gone for 7 years I still miss him. I often wish I could share this new piano playing part of my creative life with him. I continue to be inspired by his example. He was in a bands, wrote songs and zines alongside having a day job, doing an MA and being a really good friend to a lot of people. You can find out more about Andy's by reading his zine RRR#1 in which he is very eloquent about why making your own art matters, and samosas.*
Then at work this image cropped up. A glass sculpture of an HIV virus. Part of a collection of Glass Microbiology Sculptures which I think are breathtaking. The Wellcome Collection apparrently have on of these sculptures so hopefully I can actually see one sometime soon. It's the kind of thing that makes me raise an eyebrow when people say that there's a science/art war going on.
On Tuesday I went to see The Coming Storm by Forced Entertainment. I was first introduced to the work of FE while doing a devised theatre course at the City Lit more than 10 years ago. They say their intention is to take theatre and break it and then see what they can make from the bits. Sometimes at an FE show you sit through plenty of tedium and broken stuff to be presented, finally, with a moment of pure genius that could only have been arrived at by risking that it won't work at all. And that's what I like about them. They take that risk in their devising process and so I'm happy to risk a right butt numbing just to see what they come up with.
The first show I saw was Disco Relax. A show with drunk, angry, clown like people staggering, crying and ranting. I loved the commitment to the characters, or 'versions' of themselves that the cast had created for the stage. But the show dragged, and I desperately wanted those characters to interact with each other. But they didn't. They sat around with running mascara wailing and angry.
Then Quizoola. A durational performance In the "Museum Of..." before it got redeveloped into something less ephemeral and more profitable. I think it was probably November, or February. And it was cold. And my friend and I sat and sat and sat captivated by a series of pairs of people, in bad clown make-up, asking each other questions. Questions from a script. Questions that followed up interesting answers like a dog with a bone. What's the best thing you've ever put your cock into? My wife's vagina. What scares you? Flying. What do you do for a living? I'm an airline pilot. Eventually - despite forays for warming soup and tea - we got cold. Too cold to stay. The company members hanging out by the entrance were disappointed when we left. So were we. But there's a point before your toes fall of where you have to go somewhere warmer if you've got the option.
First Night - which almost failed. It pushed the boundaries of how much you can bore an audience (they took an extended tea break in the middle of the show). But..but...then that moment of pure genius. A man, zipped up to his neck in one of those enormous checked shopping/ laundry bags, being chased across the stage by someone brandishing a musical saw.Worth watching every single minute to get that, it really was.
I saw The Travels too. But I don't remember much about it - beyond the haunting quality of people describing visiting all the streets in Britain with a particular name. There was a quality of sodium light and decay about it. Kind of a theatrical equivalent of reading Iain Sincliar - but without getting stuck in a quagmire of obtuse prose.*
Exquisite pain which was just two people talking. With some back projections. But somehow it worked. Storytelling. And something about a typewriter.
Then there was Bloody Mess. Which was bloody great. A great big shambolic rock show of a theatre piece. With a woman in a gorilla suit lobbing sweets at the audience and pushing one of those lightweight striped canvas pushchairs like the one I had when i was a kid. She'd take the head of the gorilla suit off to talk to the audience from time to time. But every time she put the head back on, even though it was a pretty tatty gorilla suit, I forgot entirely the woman inside...there was just this psycho angry gorilla charging around the stage causing chaos. Ace.
Spectacular which wasn't really. In fact it was a bit dull.
But what of this latest? The Coming Storm. I'll start with the downside - some of the tropes where the acts of creating the
performance "we weren't going to do this bit", "we agreed that you
wouldn't' do this bit", "I forgot to do my dance" were made explicit -
really didn't work for me this time. Perhaps I'm so used to them they seem unnecessary or lazy the 'drama' of them seemed a little forced. But - on the whole this was a lot warmer and fuzzier than any other FE show I've seen. Mellow even. A great chaotic jumble of narratives. Lots of play with an upright piano and with music in general. Maybe I just find the presence of pianos inherently comforting these days. An act of on stage theft of audacious cheek and great beauty. And to cap it all a dinosaur chase where I had that lovely feeling of not really understanding how we'd got to this point but being very happy to let it all wash over me and sink in.
________________________ * I want to love Iain Sinclair's writing, I really do. I love the premise of his books - the subjects he takes on. But I always get really bogged down and stuck with the prose. Half the time I get half way through and founder.
So. Let's start in the middle and work outwards. With the last CD I bought. Thelonious Monk Live at the It Club. I got it second hand from Amazon for the price of about a pint and a half of beer.*
At my last piano lesson my teacher decided that I should learn something written by a "jazz" composer. Until now most of the things I'm working on are standards of the show tune/ popular love song breed*. Oh calloo callay when the lead sheet for Well You Needn't was popped onto the music rest in front of me. Do you like Thelonious Monk? my teacher asks. I nod. Oh! Yes!
What do I love about Thelonious Monk? Well firstly it's the force of his musical personality. It doesn't really matter who is playing you can hear that it's a Monk composition. Then there's his playing - the very definition of idiosyncratic. On the surface kind of wrong but at the same time deeply, joyously, stompingly right.
Monk's relationship to music seems to have been a physical one. He would get up and dance while other people were taking a solo. The 'liner notes' for this CD tell me that he used to dance when checking takes in the recording studio - and it wasn't right until he could dance to it. I like this as a litmus test. Does it make me want to boogie?
There's an incredible sense of fun here. When I listen to it (and when I practice it) I feel this great urge to muck about. It makes about six of my inner clowns shout with glee and start running about the place. You want to just randomly chuck in a 'comping chord in an outlying register of the piano - simply because it's there. Or to dance round the living room throwing shapes you'd be embarrassed by in a club.
It is a thing of clownish joy. Irreverent, out-there, and fun. Which is not to say that it is light or shallow. To say something is clownish, to me, is also to say that it reveals and yet contains and marshalls elements of chaos, nonsense, anti-sense and reistance. It acknowledges our darknesses and struggles and invites us to dance in the face of them.
______________________ Footnotes * Yes I'm one of those irritating preachy people who believe in actually paying for music and films. Or borrowing them through legitimate channels - like public lending libraries - so that the people involved in creation get their negotiated share. This here blog explains the issues very well. **Beautiful Love (well Tolerably Adequate Love the way I play it. Sigh), Once Day My Prince Frog Will Come, Manha De Carnaval....
