If anyone’s around in Exeter this coming Tuesday (august 12th) then you could do a lot worse than drop into the Cavern for a night of grand entertainment courtesy of the very wonderful Playwrights and The Legend! Plus I think I might get to spin a few discs as a ‘Careless Talks Costs Lives’ DJ, but I guess it depends on what the Cavern have in mind on that front. They usually have their own crew lined up, so… you may be spared the delights of my musical selections after all.
And if you’re in London a couple of days later (august 14th) you could do a lot worse than pop along to the Windmill in Broxton for the Artists Against Success 5th birthday shindig. Playing will be Plans & Apologies (, Frankie Machine, Johnny Domino, and MJ Hibbett & The Validators. If you’re one of the first 50 to shell out the three quid it costs to get through the door then you’ll be rewarded with a free Goody Bag, which includes a copy of their compilation album, "No Sales: No Sellout". Sounds like a swell night out.
posted by duke harringay at 4:34 PM
I’d been wondering recently why many of the stencil artworks in the city have been covered up by black rectangles and squares. This morning brought the answer with the following text found on a sticker placed over one such black area of spray-paint.
Black Square Street Art Censorship Project
This artwork has been chosen for obliteration because it was too good. Stencilled street art is too interesting and creative, it makes graffiti more accessible and makes our tags and scrawls look crude and unimaginative.It’s a war out there…
posted by duke harringay at 12:37 PM
A week since I last posted here. I have been lazy. Plus it’s been really warm here recently so I’ve been sitting in the sun reading, or out riding my bicycle, generally doing Summer things I guess. I remember something I wrote when I was like seventeen or something, about how winter was the time for writing about all things you did in the summer. Well I guess I don’t fully think the same anymore, but the general principle still nags at my heart.
Julia came around this morning which was lovely. I hadn’t seen her for ages. I was mad at myself for not getting to see her end of Foundation Year show (such is the end of term haze) but it was nice to see some photos of what she’d done, and hear about it and so forth. It made me realise I miss that kind of environment; that kind of dizzy excitement of being in Art school amongst like minded souls and having fun ideas and just doing stuff, or not even doing stuff but talking about it and hmmm, so I miss that. I suppose I have conversations with myself about such things a bit, but it’s not the same. I was thinking, at the start of the summer, how it would be fun to make the Geek Lair into a kind of gallery space or something, like, I dunno, like how whatshername did with doing a shop selling herself. Tracey Emin. She did that didn’t she? And the other whatshername? The one with the cigarette obsession. I am bad with names. Only my Geek Gallery would of course be open only to invited members of the public, so it would only ever be like a handful of people in total, and hmmm, its probably a really bad idea. Besides which where would I store my bike on its rollers, unless that became a kind of artwork in its own right, part of the installation…
I am rambling.
It was grey and dull a lot of last week and we were feeling a bit down so one afternoon C said lets go to Teignmouth. So we did.
Teignmouth is bizarre, like it’s been caught in a time bubble marked the end of the ’70s. Very freaky, and a bit sleazy and creepy. Carrie loves it, but I’m not so sure… Anyway, we walked along the sea wall in the drizzle and the wind, and then went out on the little pier, which was really weird; it was like going back to my youth in Troon, which is also a seaside town, and hmmmm… you had to walk through this amusement arcade to get out on to the end of the pier, and it was full of ancient games like penny falls and funny horse racing games called ‘derby’ and spooky little dolls in plastic cases that you had to try and grab with a mechanical device kind of thing, and it was all so OLD, but still looked kind of new, or at least looked kind of maybe ten years old – so if that’s the case it was new in the early 90s and that’s so creepy because it would all have been old-fashioned then. It was very strange.
And the people, well, I dunno, it was packed with people looking greasy, dirty, malnourished and stinking of cigarettes. Yet they all looked happy, so what the fuck do I know? I mean we were happy too, but we were kind of manic, dropped into this other world, snapping away with our digital cameras, and we’re wearing our Diesel wind breakers and Camper shoes and 100 quid sunglasses, and yikes, well it just felt so strange. Out on the end of the pier it was odd too because the rides were all really cheap and ancient looking, and small and sad… especially so because it was grey and looked more like November. There was a kiddies racing car ride that had faded and dusty looking F1 cars, except they were ancient models, from when Nelson Piquet drove for Williams and Gerhard Berger was in a Benetton and Ayrton Senna was in a Camel Lotus. Somehow it all made it seem even older than if they’d all been, I dunno, really old-fashioned racecars without wings or something.
Then opposite the pier is a big old building called ‘The Riviera’ which used to be a dance hall when it was first built back in the end of the 19th century I think… in those times Teignmouth was quite the place to be seen for the ‘in-crowd’, just as all the Devon seaside towns were I guess. All the wealthy city bods would come down and holiday there, hence the big ballroom called the Riviera. Keats stayed in Teignmouth once and finished up a couple of his famous poems there, but I know (and care) squat about poetry so I’ll shut up on that topic. The Riviera looks like an impossibly sad building now, all closed up. I think much of the ground floor is taken up with another ubiquitous amusement arcade. You can almost see the tears falling from the upper story windows. I took a photo of the empty ‘future presentations’ board out front for my photo diary. I think it was a movie theatre for a while… but now there’s another movie theatre nearby that’s just a hideous fawn coloured shed.
So that was Teignmouth. It all explained a lot about our friend Nicola’s aesthetic: we used to do the Living Room club with her, and she always had heaps of kitsch stuff – very ‘70s, and well, seeing where she grew up it all makes sense now. As we stood on the bridge over the railway we wondered how much of Troon is reflected in our aesthetics… we shuddered at the thought.
Speaking of seedy: A day or two later I was sitting in the Geek Lair making a mix CD. Leaning across to the stereo means that I’m close to the window, and the view is over the back yard of the house behind us, the one with the ‘Morgan’s room’ graffiti on the wall below the window. Anyway, so I’m just pressing ‘record’ when my eye is caught by movement in ‘Morgan’s room’. Glancing down, I see some guy making shagging motions on the bed, whilst a girls arms encircle his neck. It was kind of gross. I mean, shut the curtains at least…
I’m listening to the Relict album at the moment – a first hearing. It sounds delicious. ‘Held In Glass’ in particular is a beauty. I should write about it more soon, although I’m being kind of lazy about such things at the moment. I have a big stack of things to write about, but you know, it’s summer, and I haven’t actually listened to things much because as I said earlier, I’ve been doing a lot of riding and sitting in the sun reading… music tends to get shorter shrift in the summer these days. Odd.
Okay. I’m off now to read more Batman comics.
posted by duke harringay at 7:48 PM 