Two New Signposts

Tags

albums, Music, the winters, Turner Contemporary, Turner Margate

This blog will soon be a year old. For this reason the fifty-second post took on a certain weight of significance for me recently. What to do for that post that would be a landmark.

Luckily that decision has been made for me. I have learned of two important and impressive achievements made by two of my old friends. It seems perfectly appropriate to use this post to point outwards in the direction of their work.

The first is the release of The Winters’ first album “Riches”. I have heard it in advance and I’m proud and happy to be able to recommend it.

Get it on itunes here:

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/riches/id628107001

It’s a beautiful album.

The second is a fascinating exhibition curated by my friend Brian Dillon at the Turner in Margate. Details being:

Curiosity: Art and the Pleasures of Knowing

A Hayward Touring exhibition curated by Brian Dillon

Organized in collaboration with Turner Contemporary, Margate, and in association with Cabinet magazine

From the Turner’s website:

Exhibitions > Curiosity: Art and the Pleasures of Knowing
24 May 2013 – 15 September 2013

Enter a world of wonder, fascination and inquiry. Experience the spectacular and the bizarre, the startling and mysterious, contemporary art alongside historical artefacts, as the gallery becomes a cabinet of curiosities.

‘Like the cabinet of curiosities of the 17th century, which mixed science and art, ancient
and modern, reality and fiction, this exhibition refuses to choose between knowledge
and pleasure. It juxtaposes historical periods and categories of objects to produce an eccentric map of curiosity in its many senses’ says Curator Brian Dillon.

So think Tom Waits meets Bruce Chatwin travelling through history.

Learn more about it here:

http://www.turnercontemporary.org/exhibitions/curiosity-art-and-the-pleasures-of-knowing

It looks very exciting.

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Ghost on the No.70

Tags

Adult literature, Hovel Press, Poem, Poetry

Someone sat

 

In the corner of my vision it felt like an old friend

Long gone now

Long gone ahead

 

 

How long is that moment

When you decide whether or not to look

Maybe, you think, I really could see around that corner

The troublesome one

It might could happen on a bus

It just might could

 

 

Don’t turn your head

Leave him ghostly

Leave him loved

 

 

Long gone, long gone ahead

Chopin Cat

Tags

Adult literature, Cat, Chopin, Fiction, Hovel Press, writing

Call me… No wait, you don’t need to know anything about me.
I want to tell you about a cat. This is a one year old, male, leggy, black-and-white, pretty run of the mill cat that I got for company when it was a month or so old from an old lady who put an ad in the window of the newsagent’s down the road from where I’m living.
This cat and I are about as close as a man and a cat can be; which is to say that we spend a lot of time in close proximity to each other, I talk at him a lot and sometime he stands still and pretends to listen.
We live in a first floor flat in a quiet little street in Phibsboro. It’s just two rooms and I have to share a bathroom but its set-up really suits a cat. He enjoys climbing in and out of the first floor windows which is just about the perfect height for a cat. The flat is a bit messy and cheap so the little fellow can stroll around knocking stuff over (he is a little clumsy) and scratching stuff up (a little) to his heart’s content. The fanciest thing in this place is an old stand-up piano that was here before I was. It’s quite out of tune but it has all its keys and works just fine – not that I play the piano.
This cat doesn’t have a name, at least not that I know of. It didn’t seem like my place to name him and maybe he has some name in his own cat world.
Anyway, that is all sort of beside the point. The point is that recently my cat has started to play pieces by Chopin on the piano. Like I said I don’t play the piano but I do listen to Chopin. It’s not all I listen to but I do listen to his pieces a lot. Seems the cat has been unusually influenced by this.
He started with a few notes from Opus No. 10. Which doesn’t surprise me because I play that a lot.
To tell the truth I just thought, in the beginning, that it was some kind of coincidence but it went on and eventually I just had to accept it.
This thing got me off the vodka for two days just to make absolutely sure it was real. The experience was interesting, by the way, but thankfully not permanent.
Something to note, the cat won’t play anything else. After the initial shock that he was playing at all I kind of expected him to expand his repertoire. I’ve tried to teach him some Tchaikovsky but he just doesn’t dig on anything but the Chopin. I suppose I didn’t teach him the Chopin in the first place so it’s out of my hands.