www.skylabstories.wordpress.com

Humans!

I no longer update this blog and am 'phasing it out'...

So please go to:

www.skylabstories.wordpress.com

There is up-to-date information of what I'm up to there!

Thank you thank you,

Calebx

Let Us Bite, Bite, Bite

As ever: forgive me, it's been some time since my last blog.

Yesterday evening, I travelled over too Cardiff to install another Vermin poem in Tactile Bosch. The show is called 'Tenure' and the piece fits in well with that idea. The poem itself is written in red, on a duvet hanging from the ceiling, and the title, containing speakers which play the poem like a menacing phone call, are just above it. The publicity image is above, though I ended up using a pizza wheel/knife (with the word 'pizza' in it) as the cutlery to go either side of the participant's head...

Instructions:

Place your head to the pillow. Take a moment to rest. Feast your ears on what the bed
is saying. Read the small print under the duvet. Acknowledge you accept the Terms and
Conditions of your nap by writing your name on the front of the duvet. Just sign. Sweet
Dreams. Let us bite.

This piece invites you to be the guest of honour at a feast in New York. With vampires
everywhere in pop culture, the resurgence of one infestation in NYC presented delicious
potential to combine contracts and coercion, gangsters and gluttony.

Vermin takes as its starting point those species humanity has deemed ‘ excessive’ , pairing them with human excess: vengeful seagulls (Vermin I: Cull (After Hitchcock)), avaricious ants (Vermin II: Super.Organism), lusty pigeons (To His Coy Hen or, The Closest to the Dodo) and vain rats (Vermin IV: An Exact Science – previously installed at Tactile Bosch).

Here's what you hear through the pillow:



I'm planning to finish the last two Vermin pieces over the next two months and hoping to collaborate with an artist friend to illustrate them, in a set of little Beatrix-Potter-gone-wrong books...

Poo-tee-weet? Life doesn't have to be ugly.

Once again, I have ventured forth into the realms of participatory arts...

This time, for a night at the Cube Cinema in Bristol called Beacons, Icons and Dykons, in honour of John Waters this time. The night consisted of various performances, some music and then a screening of 'Pink Flamingoes', Waters' proto-gross-out disgusting-fest starring the inimitable Divine.

The equally inimitable performance artist Paul Hurley (as my partner I would call him that, wouldn't I?) performed an epic cross-stage-licking piece inspired by this scene from the film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gl4f7wK67Uw

Suffice to say there was no kissing until a significant amount of tooth-brushing and drinking had washed away the stage-residue.

For my part, I carried out a sound piece called 'Poo-tee-weet?/Life Doesn't Have To Be Ugly' where I asked people to emulate Kathleen Turner 'Serial Mom' demonstrating her innocence to the visiting police officers by calling to the birds outside the window...

'Officers, life doesn't have to be ugly: just listening to the birds out there...'

It reminded me of the last moments of Kurt Vonnegut's 'Slaughterhouse Five', in which a bird calls 'Poo-tee-weet?' in the wreckage of Dresden after the Allied bombing there.

Even though they are a mating call, a territorial cry, we see bird song as somehow innocent, free of mankind's apparent urge to destroy one another. So I thought it would be fun (well - interesting) to get people to emulate the bird song of the person who came before them and create a 'dawn chorus' of human birds to play in the foyer of the cinema. I'll aim to put up the results, perhaps with Serial Mom at the beginnning, once I get the technology sorted.

Powder-Monkey

I read at a Pride fundraiser last night - a lovely event where various intrepid writers went off for twenty minutes to create pieces based around words shouted out by the audience. The quality of what they managed to make was really impressive and highly entertaining.

It fell to me to amuse those remaining for the intervening twenty minutes...And the second piece I performed contained the following villanelle, based around the terms 'Monkey Hangers' (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_hanger ) and 'Powder Monkey' (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powder_monkey ).


Here's the poem:


Powder-Monkey

My hands and their eyes turned the pitchest of black
The sea waves the same to a creature or boy
So they’ll say that a monkey hangs over the deck.

For the days and leagues before we were wracked
The Captain’s tide turned; there were no ships ahoy,
My hands and their eyes turned thepitchest of black.

With Napoleon’s garb buttoned up to my neck
In my tiny cockade, a mechanical toy:
So they say that a monkey hangs over the deck.

When the gulls formed an Empire and started to peck,
The crew’s tattered bodies became Trompe-l'œil:
My hands and their eyes turned the pitchest of black.

When our enemy’s land became more than a speck
Sail-wrapped and mast-snapped, too numb to feel joy
They’ll say that a monkey hangs over the deck.

I wanted to plead but my salty tongue cracked,
The court on the sand didn’t know the word ‘boy’:
My hands and their eyes went the pitchest of black
As they cheer that a monkey hangs over the deck.


I also read a story, which I'll pop up on my Skylab Stories blog, as it's more of the psychadelic Victoriana...

Logan's Run Middle Class Butlins

Forgive me, Blog, it's been some time since I last blog-ged.

Thanks goodness, the festive Season is over! As much as I'm not quite a bah-humbug type, I'm glad that life seems to be able to continue...

We're presently at Center Parcs in Elveden for my Mum's 60th birthday. A Canadian friend asked what it was and I said there were villas and a swimming complex and such - and she said 'So it's like Butlins?' To which I could only reply yes, ot's like a middle-class Butlins. My partner Paul initially though it was ALL under a big glass dome - like the 70s sci-fi film Logan's Run. But it's not - just the Subtropical Swimming Paradise, which we've already visited a couple of times - and gone on all the flumes and rapids. Fun.

This morning, my little nieces were excited about a squirrel outside on the summer tables and chairs. There's a lot of them here - it's re-asserted my idea that a Squirrel Army would be the most fearsome of weapons. Must start farming them.

Goodness, someone's obviously thought of it already!

Climbing Everest (Secretarial Services)

Apologies for the terrible lapse in blog-age: what with moving house and the continued job-hunt and general readjustment to not-being-in-an-office-every-day-ness, I had a lapse.

However, I am not settled into my new abode - just down the corridor from Lady High Renaissance - and cracking on with things. One of which is filling in an Arts Council application for a project we may be doing at Clevedon Pier - the Funding Gods willing - next year.

To which end, I have just been to print out the forms so I can work my way through them in tangible paper from as well as ephemeral digital form (forms). Since the printing shop has shut along Gloucester Road, visited a shop just down the road called Everest Secretarial Services. It's worth a visit if only for the chat with the old lady who works there and for the window on another time it appears to be. With me, one other chap needing to fax some papers (a challenging two sheets) to India and another waiting (he had an appointment) for his CV to be rejigged, the lady was so flustered initially that she asked me to come back in a bit - even though all I wanted was to print from a memory stick. This was quite an advanced request, though. I can only imagine what she did to the CV, whatever it was I would imagine it was very en vogue in the late (19)70s.

However, in the short time that I was there she did convey the information that Imogen (who called but was told she was far too busy with three people waiting and was, perhaps, a daughter) was refusing to cook Christmas dinner for her in-laws as they'd forgotten her birthday; that Everest Lady had given up on the central heating and that was why the paper was steaming as it came out of the printer; and that if it did snow, she wanted to the M4, M25 AND A12 all to be blocked so that she didn't have to attend Christmas with Imogen or any of the others. They had the Daily Mail guide to birds on the wall. You could almost hear the sound of the mechanical typewriters in there...

OK, so the printing was 10p/sheet - eek! - but the added extras were pretty special.

Going Rouge: A Fabulous Life, by Me

Just been reading a (fairly crass) satire of ol' gun-totin' hockey-playin' Sarah Palin's 'auto' biography. Let us be in no doubt there must have been significant ghost-writing here - to the extent of the film Poltergeist. He book is built on an Indian burial ground, it's that ghosty.

Here she is with a gun. She loves guns. For killin' animals and all.



I think there's ample scope for a gleefully camp take on it as per my blog entry title. Perhaps with me, or some other willing make-up wearer, as Palin all glammed-up with lots of rouge on, in the style of a Pierre et Gilles photo like these:




And this one:



That's it - I'm thinking LOTS of glitter, a very, very phallic gun and perhaps a protruding price tag from the bikini she'd be wearing. I'm sure she'd love it in all it's campery. Fabulous.