This is just a general posting to draw your attention to the new Subscribe to my mailing list button. On your left, see? and on the e-archive menu, there? and below,
here?
That’s all, Thanks.
December 2011
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Category Archives: Broken Links?
A Tuesday Out of Time
This week I was down in London to see a rare screening of two documentary 16mm films, Mur Murs (dir. Agnes Varda 1981) and Get Out The Car (dir. Thom Andersen 2010). Both films explore and employ direct artistic engagement within the urban environment, they document the city of Los Angeles – specifically the Mexican/Chicano barrios at the unfashionable edges of the city. Hand-held camera (a particular forte of 16mm film) slow sweeps across architectural decoration, walls, murals, buildings, painted shop fronts and empty spaces. The films both come across as quite psycho-geographical in intent.
Mur Murs embraces the “immersive dreamscape” of the city’s murals. Giving sequences of street art shots: from the spontaneous folk art of graffiti, pietas of Guadalupe galore, hand-painted retablos and adverts, through to therapeutic public art and rehabilitative art projects, this subject is close to my heart, see my essay Criminal Damage? Nah mate! I’m a muralist in the Social Realism style. Focussing on a handful of recognised muralists from Chicano and other traditions, Varda intersperses interviews, reconstructions and interactions with their works and the people who live in the streets around the murals. Philosophies, histories, communities, cultures and milieux emerge. Although many murals have been demolished, obscured, built-over, overpainted or rotted forgotten, many are seen preserved in tact in the warm, dry Californian climate. The film was made in 1981 and I wondered how many remain 30 years later. Is street art necessarily transient?
Thom Anderson’s Get Out The Car seems to say that it’s not just transient, it’s virtually extinct. The title of the film is an injunction to stop the car and start looking about. Made in 2010 on old obsolete 16mm film stock, the documentary has a patina of the twentieth century about it. All the more apposite since the film concerns the loss of shared local cultural heritage. A montage of disused billboards, archaic neon, derelict buildings, emptied shops and historic clip joints reduced to parking lots. Laid out in long lingering shots with a collaged soundtrack cut to the image, as primitive as it is scratchy. As the film progresses I was shown decommissioned advertising hoardings where scraps of image curl and coalesce with previous peeling adverts, shadow faces bleached of colour flutter away from the memory of the other faded faces underneath, the poster layer below. There were faces, ghost faces and jumbled cut-up words hidden in the raggle-taggle remnants of an advertising medium from the last century.
It struck me later that roadside hoardings are a defunct format nowadays, pretty much universally superseded by the internet. Why shout to them from the side of the road when they’re pissed off stuck nose to tail at a junction, when you can sidle up to them while they’re happily distracted downloading pornography at home. The disappearance of street art in Cambridge in the form of billboards was brought home to me a few years ago whilst on a ‘bollocks sticker’ seeking psycho-geographical quest, which is documented in Walking in circles for fun.
Prior to going to the cinema, I had been down Sun Street to visit the Bank of Ideas. An outpost of the occupylsx movement camped outside St. Paul’s…(to be continued…)
Bella Basura
December 2011
The Spam Trap
I’m re-re-re-reading “I’m OK You’re OK” and “The Games People Play” today, so that’s what this (at least) monthly blog is about. I could be writing about any number of other things – The full-moon gathering we had, or The Fall gig (I liked the support band – Bricotech?) or Jonny’s open-mic-nite at the 5, no 6 Bells (Spaghetti Faction spot-on as always), or even just be out chilly in the winter sunshine in the Park just because it’s Tea’s birthday.
But I’m not going to, I’m going to read “I’m OK You’re OK” and “The Games People Play”, because I’m in the throes of yet another “My dumb man done gone an left me again (but I bet he’s just hiding down the pub with that stupid needy piss-head friend of his) why doesn’t he just phone blues” stylee weekend. So in many ways this 1960’s pop-psychology stuff is quite fraught really.
I’m also approaching these books (“I’m OK You’re OK” and “The Games People Play”) with a weird 21st century jadiness, or ennui, that keeps reminding me that all this stuff was written a very long-time ago. And they’re American. They say that an alcoholic man needs the consistent support of up to 5 adults, who are prepared to play roles like “patsy” or “good guy” or “persecutor” or “rescuer” or “bar tender” and that the “payoff” is not the drinking itself, but the self-castigating hangover afterwards.
What do I want to say in this blog today?
Well, I started out with the intention of making it a weekly blog, then I thought I might manage monthly and now I’m scraping my own barrel, so to speak. I had a plot for weekly posts, a kinda generic rolling theme thang – one week a book review, next week an event report, or an e-archive update – nothing has happened on the e-archive this month and I need to get back to my books (“I’m OK You’re OK” and “The Games People Play”). So I guested Doc Gordon Tripp to write this blog just for today!
Go Trippy Go!
I’m staying away from facebook and I’ve also signed up to a handful of FREE self-help websites.
I think my brain just got spammed! I almost typed in the URLs of these demented websites I’ve signed up to. I just nearly spammed my own blog!
If anybody out there is actually still reading…Just how mushy is your mind?
I think my phone just rang! Must dash!
Doc. Gordon Tripp
November 2011
e-archive update
Here is a further addition to my e-archive
Set down in an inconspicuous hollow, just a few dozen feet from the edge of the busy dual-carriageway of Newmarket Road, lies Cambridge’s oldest surviving building. The Stourbridge Hospital for Lepers and its Chapel, dedicated to St Mary Magdalene was built sometime before 1150. During the Leprosy epidemics of the 13th century the hospital flourished, but as leprosy declined the need grew less and the hospital was closed in 1279.
Only the dinky little one-storied Norman chapel now remains, the wooden hospital and leper huts surrounding it have long since fallen into disrepair and collapsed. The little chapel itself has come close to dereliction on a number of occasions in the past 700 years. In the 14th century the vaulted roof collapsed and was replaced by voluntary labour. By 1606, it had ceased to be a chapel and passed into private ownership. During the 1750’s it was used as a barn and storage shed. In 1816 it was nigh on falling down when the first of four major restorations was begun. Once restored the Chapel became the property of the University of Cambridge. It was further restored in 1865, 1925 and 1951, when it passed into the hands of the Cambridge Preservation Society who continue to maintain and upkeep the building to the present day.
That this plain little chapel, contemporaneous with Chartres Cathedral, should survive intact through over 700 years may be partly due to its association with the famous Stourbridge Fair. In fact the original fair was founded by the Leper chapel, in 1211 the lepers were granted permission from King John to hold a 3 day fair in the grounds of the chapel. The date set was “The Feast of the Exultation of the Holy Cross”, the 14th September.
In 1289, with the Leper Hospital closed, The Corporation of Cambridge took over the running of the fair, which spread rapidly, establishing itself as a major annual gathering. In 1516 Stourbridge Fair lasted from 24th August until 29th September. In 1725 it was one of the largest fairs in Europe, and had been name-checked by Daniel Defoe, John Bunyan and Samuel Pepys, amongst others.
However, in 1811 the fields on which the fair took place were enclosed, areas were sold off: the decline of Stourbridge Fair had begun. The riotous and bawdy atmosphere of the three week long fair had long incurred the wrath of the University who banned students from the Fair. Meanwhile the Victorian fashion for restraint further added to a decline in attendance, in 1933 the Stourbridge Fair closed drab with disinterest.
In 2004 the Friends of the Leper Chapel, a charity supporting the work of the Cambridge Preservation Society, revived the fair in the grounds of the Leper Chapel.
The revived Stourbridge Fair has taken place in September every year since.
Jean Dark
July 2005
Further information
Cambridge Spirit of Place – Nigel Pennick (2004)
Stourbridge Leper Chapel – Barry Pearce (2003)
Coldham’s Common & the Leper Chapel (guided history tour walk) – to reserve a place phone: Alan Brigham (01223) 212189
A Reprise of Blackberries
This coming week, 26th September to 2nd October 2011, is an exciting and important week for me. In Earth Pathways Diary 2011 the week is faced by an article I have written, Picking Brambles. If you’ve got a copy you can turn there now and check it out!
In accordance with the time of the year, the Wheel of the Year, the piece concerns folkloric, anecdotal and ecological ideas around the harvest of late fruiting wild Blackberries.
The publication of this piece marks a significant milestone in my personal journey, one spanning over seven years, stretching back from now, autumn 2011 to spring 2004 when a version of Picking Blackberries was first published. Back to 2004 and beyond, in both directions.
The Free Pagan Press, who first printed Picking Blackberries, was edited by Dill & Pete Ravell, it was a small independent quarterly. Small press publications have always been a great passion of mine, particularly magazines and pamphlets. This passion is all the more driven in the current cultural environment where I hear on a regular basis of independent magazines, small publishers, alternative bookshops, and distributors going bust.
Or they become e-zines – tiny exquisite crafts lost forever in the information overload/content lite becalmed oceans of cyberspace.
The Free Pagan Press sub-titled itself “The Magazine for Open Paganism”. This ticked many of the boxes for me, so I wrote Picking Blackberries and posted it to Dill (hardcopy A4 double-spaced, in an envelope, with a stamp, in a pillar box).
I was delighted when my complimentary copy dropped through my letterbox, pleased to have my writing appear in such a lovely little ‘zine. In fact the Spring 2004, Free Pagan Press issue 15 was the last paper version of the magazine.
There are still a few small independent pagan ‘zines going, Deosil Dance, Northern Earth, Hedgewytch and The Cauldron come to mind, but the pool is becoming ever smaller.
In 2009 Silver Wheel Magazine, another small press magazine which had been publishing quarterly since the 1986, changed its format to an annual Journal. Although it was sad to see another independent magazine fold, the new book format opened the opportunity for longer, more considered and advanced articles on British Witchcraft Traditions to be published. The Author & Editor, Anna Franklin included a version of Picking Blackberries in the first volume. Silver Wheel Journal has gone from strength to strength. This year’s volume, the third, is better than ever, including articles by Nigel Pennick, Emma Restall-Orr, Sorita d’Este, Kristoffer Hughes and Michael Howard. The stunning colour cover depicts a blazing horned wicker man raising up his arms to a fat full moon. This is made all the more poignantly beautiful as it was the last work of Artist and Photographer Paul Mason, who died unexpectedly earlier this year. The loss of an artist is a greater loss to the world.
In March 2010 an edited version Picking Brambles was selected for inclusion in the inspiring Moonshare Collective’s Earth Pathways Diary 2011, with Glennie Kindred, Jaine Rose, Hannah Willow and Suzi Goose as fellow contributors. It is this version that appears facing 26th September to 2nd October. This week, in fact.
Jean Dark
September 2011
Websites
Earth Pathways Diary
Silver Wheel Journal
The 2012 Earth Pathways Diary, which also features Jean Dark, is available from
Libra Aries Books