Today I made the Beatles age of 64, never thought that song may apply to moi! I am posting an old foto of this old fart wherein I still got as much hair as I want and all me tooths, that’s the tooth. As reglia followers of this blArb know, I don’t look the same man now!
Pete aged about 22
Also, on me boithday, I had choices and I chose to do my classes as usual; I got a great mat for doing Vinyassa Yoga with Sam in th’morn, she really push us thru our paces but so gently you hardly notice what yer doing til you suddenly find your left toe in your right ear and Master Ch’n returned after several weeks away to try teaching me Tai Chi. His patience with me is astounding as I am such a thick-head when it comes to taking in anything which is repetitive and ‘form’. But they say it’s good fer ya as ye gits older and older, Tai Chi that is. It’s a funny ting but when i try persuade my kids in their mid-twenties to take on the challenges and benefits of tai chi & yoga they just mock me. They don’t know what they’re missing.
SEEE– The Staggering Effusive Effulgent Effrontery of Grayson Perry and His Smashing Pot on Channel 4 really impressed upon me this week in the ch4 show wherein he talked to several people who had had life-altering activities in recent times. I must apologise for grouping him, in a recent blArt, alongside Ermine & Berst, I was really really wrong, he is an extremely good artist which I already acknowledge (even though he draws unwell or rather ham-fistedly his imagery is ‘different’, it is worked and it is interesting) but the sum of his output, which must now include being a television presenter, is quite stunning. His broad reach of technique (and his knowledge of different arts and cultures) is impressive. His way with people and his calm questioning of their motives and self-view are also highly informed and seem very natural, maybe coming from his real-lating-ships with his cross dressing and his sessions together with his wife’s psychotherapeutic knowledge?
I done a phew wrong tings this week like on Thursday I posted my first video on utube http://youtu.be/OUkrryYo8AU and getting excited at actually having done it I then posted two more before gaining reaction to the thirst. Gavin said, ‘There’s a thin line between deep & dull’ and my videos aim to be deep but came over rather dull. No bounce, no dance in the words as I read them with some difficulty. The words in the poems are put together and re-manipulated over a prolonged period of thinking and study and consideration and changing and re-moulding and all. the video was slapped together impromptu-ly and doesn’t do justice to the words. However, I must thank my friend Dave Doughty for pushing me into doing the thing to the ultimate aim of posting up on utube which now I have cottoned on to how to, I shall do it some more. Whether I need to use utube or not is a different question? I can probably upload video to my blArtspot on wordpress, we’ll have to see. I don’t think my utube video is about to get as many hits as Susan Boyle did, is it. Her voice on the first day after her stunning performance on X Factor was a revelation, my voice on the vids is just, dull. I have sent it out to about 20 folk and the resounding silence seems to say sumptin to me and I shall be back, that’s not a threat it’s a promise, am working on them, I tink I know watti need to do. My old mate DW has made it very clear.
As it happens I got a copy of Jackie Leven’s The Mystery Of Love Is Greater Than The Mystery Of Death cd http://www.discogs.com/Jackie-Leven-The-Mystery-Of-Love-Is-Greater-Than-The-Mystery-Of-Death/release/1106041 with the beautiful track Inside This Clay Jug on with Robert Bly, American Poet, reciting Kabir’s poem. NOW THERE’S A VOICE! WOW. Bly tells the poem in such verve & enunciation, so articulating the simple words, so describing them with his mouth instrument. There’s something to live up to, to aim for to aspire to and I have a very very long way to travel. I cannot even recite my own words, the readings had no life in them. I hope, like when alcoholics realise their dependence, now I have realised my crap skills I shall begin to rectify. Watch this space if you can bear it. watch this too for a lovely mention of the three harmonious faiths of China; Buddhism, Confusianism & Taoism. I sometimes, recently, have wondered if i am barking up the right tree with my new works on the clay jug theme. this wonderful trip down the yangtse says YES, yse pete you are on the right trail. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04mj989/sacred-rivers-with-simon-reeve-3-the-yangtze
They say Wilko Johnson has had his cancer taken away, ‘Big as a baby’ he said the growth was. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-29727632 They had only given him only a few months to live then Addenbrookes found it was a rare form which they could cut out and they did. Hoe excellent is that, int that gud? I took some great photos of him back in the late 70’s, in Chompsferd of all places!
Also Simon Bacon, whose sculptures have been on at Sculpt Gallery Tiptree and with Debra at the Affordable art fair in Londres is gud news too. Simon did his MA at the same time I did mine and I loved his work then. I am so glad he’s started to sell.
On Sunday I popped into Londin toon and did a dummy run for when I have to get to the RA for 08.30 hrs in November. I dropped into the Poetry Library, Southbank, London (they recently bought my latest book and one I did in collaboration with the world-renowned author on ‘typo’ and a mean letterpress printer himself, David Jury) and I checked out some E E Cummins. What I find interesting, altho I know little about his background I expect he must have been fairly well off to get to Harvard in 1911, what I find interesting is that I (who were poor) went to college for 4 years and in a way I was therefore given the time to think and write. Which would have been a rare commodity to a working class boy back in the time of WW1 & 2. So, in the 1960’s when there seemed a lot of hope that our world would grow out of wars and become a better place, despite Vietnam, I was allowed to stretch my mind in philosophy and art etc. I retired from my day job in c.2009 and have since returned to my dreams, as a writer artist (altho I must say I never stopped ‘making’ my outputs). The reason I mention it is cos therefore, I had similar opportunities to much more ‘privileged classes’ of previous generations. I think my book of 1975 was in fact a pioneering piece;
totally my own work, self published and with altered spellings. The pioneering was not so much in the content as in leading the field in artists book, I published around the same time as some significant players whom those who study artisbuk in the States will be aware of were self publishing etc.
I used altered spelling in the above book (1975) as you can see from its title attached, the yellow cover, title in handwritten ink. Recently I have returned to use altered spellings, which in my private journals I never stopped doing, but I now find that there is a whole range of possibilities with its use. Miriam Patchen commended me on that book, made some reference to her friend E E Cummings. If you go into my ‘about’ at the top of this blUrt you’ll find her comments.
Watch out for my next BLART, it’s gonna be a big appropriation from Neil Young, John Peck and others. the ubu site is all about appropriation nowadays but Picabia appropriated Neitzche in the early 20th century and i appropriated Picabia in the recent collaboration with David. Hee Hee.
apulhed tingling 