I am posting from a new UK domain set up by Lisa’s brill brother – https://www.mediamarmot.com/
I will maintain the US one until its all settled down and tested.

A couple of people requested a bit of an explanation of the Easter Christmas thingies.

Good art requires no explanation – somewhat dodgy art does – as my efforts are currently on the dodgy side it would churlish to mount my high horse and refuse to explain what i am trying to do – so here goes.

btw the way i will post about my new treatment soon – nothing exciting to report though other than keeping track of the 10 different medications requiring different doses on different days at different times of the day, pre meals after meals without meals – Art set up an App for me – the reminder alarm sounds like an angry cat and consequently frightened the fur of Vinnie cat who was sitting on my phone at the time – but without that i would probably have overdosed and died – arghhh

The Easter thingy

The Christmas and Easter pieces are both about the absurdity of religious festivals, religious myths and religion itself (I am aware that not everyone shares this view and that’s just fine by me – there are centuries worth of creative works that provide a more positive take more persuasively than I can ever hope to counter). The 2 pieces try to make the point by making as little sense as their intended targets. The vocal characters are all played by me either live, pre-recorded, digitally processed or synthesised. By offering this range of different versions of me the authenticity of the content becomes difficult to discern. Is this authentic, serious, silly, truthful, original, derivative, meaningful? – the listener may ask of the work and thus by extension of the Easter/Christmas story they depict. The setting is always the same – a telephone box from which disembodied voices may be discerned. Evoking a stable or a tomb I suppose in this case. In the background randomly sequenced echoes of previous broadcasts may be heard as well as extracts that may not have been previously heard in other pieces and may or may not be ‘meaningful’ to me or any other listener as well as randomly generated ‘spot’ effects. In the Easter piece a tribute is played in the background to Mahler’s resurrection symphony, but the original instruments are changed to electronic instruments (reflecting similar changes to those imposed on my voice) along with time signatures, keys, tempi, sequencing and the layering of phrases. The music also acknowledges Berio’s Sinfonia which happens to also be a reworking of the same movement of Mahler’s resurrection Symphony and from whom I stole the idea. In the Christmas piece references are made to Away in a Manger which the synthesiser read as manager because of the spell check function insistence that i missed and created quite a nice random gag. Repeated characters add the illusion of purpose and structure but really there is none – Making the point again that any quest to find sense, particularly in the mythologies propagated by religions, is as foolish as dinosaurs playing the flute, campaigns to return magic rings to little girls from Cadbury’s chocolate adverts or efforts to decode my two pieces. Everything is just daft and pointless except the actual act of making the art – the point made by Andy Warhol and oft repeated by me.

“Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art

sources and inspiration;  Berio’s Sinfonia, Dada collage and bricolage, some Charles Ives songs, 19th century melodrama (ie spoken text combined with music) Thomas Edison’s ‘Spirit Machine,’ Henry Hunning’s carbon granule transmitter (used in some early phones until Edison commercialised his own) (yes he really did live in Bolton Percy our nearest village), John Cage’s use of chance to create musical structures, David Bowie’s cut ups to create lyrics. – i cant face formally referencing these so just google the keywords and phrases above

Hope that is interesting

immediately after my live broadcast on Easter Sunday there was a power outage at the Ogden Utah data center and all the sites hosted on the server that hosts Gravityisahat went down. Blimey I thought ‘my telephone box has broken the internet – i guess god has finally got pissed off with my childish assaults on his only child and his special days.’ Anyway I prayed to the Saint of IT support and behold my site has risen again as a recorded version of the live broadcast with the cockups at the beginning, where i dialled the wrong number twice, eviscerated. Ha God – Take that!

What news? Nothing much. Nothing particularly amusing – even the cats, usually a reliable source of anecdotes are in a sort of lockdown stupor. We will be seeing the boys and girls very soon, once we are allowed and can’t wait. They will still be confined to the annex and another empty house we have been loaned but things are much more relaxed now that us three oldies are well on the way to being fully vaccinated and everyone can take the covid tests regularly. It has been a very long long time without seeing them all – poor Arthur has had two birthdays locked down.

Maria is back at work protected by screens and the luxury of a very long room. She is at one end the with the windows open, the lasses are at the other behind perspex – Maria needs her opera glasses to see them and an ear trumpet to hear them but it’s a good arrangement. She was anxious about going back but only for a day a day or two. She finished the term by falling flat on her face, not metaphorically but literally. Like a naughty 10 year old she came home with a grazed knee, a skinned hand and a bloody nose. She’s fine but she did want to cry. I told her to go and change her smock and that if she was going to be so clumsy she wouldn’t be allowed to play in the barn with the rough boys again.

I have been obsessing with my third live broadcast from the phone box for 8:00 pm on Easter Sunday. This is my shot at a resurrection theme eg – improving on Bach, Maher, all the renaissance masters and Dave Allen. To be frank I am not convinced that my approach has worked. But in the spirit of not hiding ‘misses’ I am going ahead with the broadcast. I find delivering and thus closing something even if it’s horribly flawed more satisfying than waiting for the illusive perfection that, in my case, never comes. The first piece was too earnest and too long, the second one was too long, it follows, in the Goldilocks tradition that this one should be just right but it isn’t.

I have promised in the past, not to explain my art, so here comes an explanation and another broken promise. FORGIVE ME.

I am interested, and have been for some time, in making art that doesn’t say anything much it just messes about. Serendipity is also a crucial element. Trying to say nothing sounds like a bit of a folly given my principal medium is speech, but you get my drift. Charles Ives managed to combine quotes from cheap songs with hymns, street bands, his own pretty naff poetry, the European classical music tradition and what sounds like laying his fingers randomly on the keyboard and banging about in a sort of hyper personal pot pourri – I am after the same. It means that the work has to tread a very risky path that is dangerously close to being just bad or amateurish or a mess. Amateur is the ultimate insult to the “serious” artist. But why I ask? Grayson Perry is another of my heroes (even though I don’t much care for his pots) because he doesn’t appear to make a distinction between amateur and professional it’s all just art. Pinterest should remind us that amateur craftspeople are as able artists as professional artists they just don’t necessarily do it as “professionally.” Maybe “professional” is a word I am beginning to despise like “experts.” UH OH!! My point is that the act of doing is what matters, self evaluation or reflection is just masturbation. Once again I refer to Warhol

“Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.”

Resurrection has taken a good deal of work, not just because I wanted to try something technically that I had wanted to do for ages, but had always seemed like too much effort (consequently I wasted tons of time teaching myself skills I ended up not using that much) but also because, when it came to the really creative bit, as against the technical bit, yet again, my muse decided to pack her bags and go to her caravan in Filey for a couple of months leaving me stranded. So it is what it is – a bit bad. It owes a lot a lot a lot to Berio’s Sinfonia as well as Charles Ives and a bit to Phillip Pullman’s version of Grimm’s Fairy Tales – that also inspired George and Avani’s movie – but also most importantly to some random laying down of fingers on the computer keyboard and banging about. It’s not an audio piece in the studio sense of the word. It can’t be refined because it has to work to the acoustic properties of its environment – I cant mix it in the conventional sense – it has only two layers foreground (in the receiver ear piece) and background (everywhere else). That limitation should be an asset. I don’t think it is at the moment.

I guess I will carry on ‘telephoning’ until I have closed the loop next Halloween and then I think I will have exhausted all available bitter and ironic takes on ritual celebrations and religious holidays and will move on to something else. I am behind on a couple of other projects and I have plans for a series of short stories which I am looking forward to starting – my phone box art continues to fascinate but I feel the need to get away from my own voice and listen to some of the others in my head.

However should you wish to catch the latest it will be linked from here on the night.

I will be back on the chemo on April 6th. It is accompanied by high dose steroids so be prepared for a tsunami of 3:00 am blog posts. It’s permanent medication, or rather I take it for as long as it continues to work. I am told it is well tolerated so I am hopeful it won’t be too harsh. We’ll see.

There has been an explosion of industry and creativity in the family with Lisa qualifying as a registered masseuse TODAY! – she is going onto specialise in musicians and people with RSI – and she knows loads of latin anatomical words. She did the whole very demanding course over the year of lockdowns which we reckon is pretty blooming impressive. We are lining up for treatment as soon as she can get to lay hands upon us. BRILLIANT!

George and Avani have done this fantastic adaptation of a Grimm tale for Ek’s birthday. Having put together the odd few minutes of movie footage myself i can tell you this is truly epic and must have taken days and days. I have watched it many times – i love it – the only thing is that having set myself up as the family avant-garde, surrealist, absurdist specialist it seems the grimm/shah/newell combo has blown me out of the water. Drat!

Arthur bought a cheapo classical guitar at the start of lockdown and has progressed to Bach preludes which to be frank pisses me off. I have now been playing bass for 20 years and have progressed to shoddy versions of the Allman Bros Band played very slowly.

I have had my vaccine – all down to my beloved who managed to get through to the right person at our surgery explain to them that my cancer treatment was on hold until i got it and within hours i had it done. She may have saved my life or is that a bit melodramatic – no i don’t think so. Needless to say i was too British to hustle and was quietly waiting in the queue as though expecting a number 25 bus to Upton Park to come along eventually.

My achievements – duh – a story about a cat that gets run over by a steam roller. Good though in my view.

As I approach the Beatles song age on Saturday I feel the need to vent something important worthy of my imminent descent into ‘old geezerness.’ Albert Steptoe springs to mind although Wilfred Bram/bell/well was probably about 42 when he played the role. Talking of maturity I once tasted a 100 year old port – it was unpleasant but certainly memorable – perhaps I will be similarly rancidly recordable in 2057.

To celebrate my Birthday, It would be nice to hear other people’s news that hasn’t been passed through the social media “remove anything remotely challenging filter.” So get cracking you lot!

I am happy to report that our four kiddies are coping admirably with Lockdown 2 (or is it 3) and so are we. I admit to a touch of lethargy but they be the result of our coal burning polluting stoves being too roasty toasty (soon to be banned I gather). Actually I thought the myeloma was back with renewed lockdown enthusiasm because over XMAS along with the lethargy the dreaded back ache came back I was a wee bit of a misery – anyway since then the back ache has gone away (an Xmas miracle (must have been my dedication to the Presepio (or in Neopolitan dialect Presebio – Angela (p’s become b’s in Paupisan) ) so I am very very very very thankful.

Despite that welcome deliverance I am preparing to embark on the chemo journey again as advised by the National Amyloidosis Centre and my consultant at York – a newly approved formula that includes another derivative of thalidomide – some other compound I can’t remember – duh  – and steroids! Hurrah. This was predicted months and months ago as my numbers slowly deteriorated and is not a disappointment or setback. I have done really well for two years with only a very slow slide toward the stage where this intervention has become necessary.  That may be down to the stupidly expensive herbal curcumin I take but that may well be snake oil. Though delighted by the prospect of the creative hyperactivity the steroids impart I confess I am not looking forward to feeling ill again or the monthly visits to the hospital given the current danger of death that trips ‘abroad’ (touch of Bridgerton there (wasn’t it a fab show – I fancied him too – and the WIGS!)  however danger of death in the current climate is s certainly not my exclusive concern so I plan to suck it up – besides I am probably 64 when you read this, so times nearly up.

Speaking of times nearly up – I am putting my affairs in order – not because I am pessimistic actually the opposite I am feeling very optimistic that I still have lots to offer and lots to add to my affairs that will consequently need ordering. Anyway the process involves purchasing a lovely bamboo box drawer set (something of a fetish of mine we now have three) from Amazon and every time I think of something that will confound my decedents I bung it in with the intent of explaining it later – so far it includes a scratchy awful video on CD of my production of La Pazzia Senile I did in the 90’s with no audience and an inaudible narration by a dear actor friend that should explain what’s going on – and  an equally inaudible live audio recording of an opera (Dirty Tricks) by my best friend Paul  Barker (concept by me) written in iambic pentameters (after Shakespeare) by Steven Chance – that SHOULD NOT HAVE FAILED TO DELIGHT IN THE WAY IT DID – cos it was rather brilliant – I will collect my catalogue of telephone box audio files in due course – my collection of old Eynsford memorabilia (mainly postcards) – all my poems and stories even the terrible and incomplete ones – the instructions for the telephone box to insure it chatters on in perpetuity – FAT CHANCE (sadly it would be months of work to document and even then I doubt I could communicate it in a way that would make any sense) – together with passwords to bill payment websites-  so that’s my legacy sorted out – inexplicable operas with associate funny and largely inaudible voices, a bunch of dog eared faded postcards sent by unknown people, and equally dog eared poems and bills.

The Uni work is intense – tons of prep and marking – the hard part is staying up with the tech. I guess it’s a good way of staving of Alzheimer’s but blimey modern software packages are so fiddly and so hard to remember (oh oh – early onset on its way).

I am planning but not producing the next live broadcast for the telephone box that talks like me. It’s for Easter Sunday so resurrection themes could fit the bill nicely. I am still obsessed with Berio’s sinfonia that quotes from Mahler 2^nd Symphony (The Resurrection Symphony – aha) – so sampling a work that is a compilation of samples is suitably post-modern I suppose – but could be horribly dull – that’s as far as my thinking has gone so I have a bit to do.

I have also found another interesting alignment between my enthusiasms and heroes that may bare so telephone box fruit in the future. It’s probably not true but could it be the case that Charles Ives who lived close to New York heard or saw my anarchist heroine Emma Goldman (who also lived in New York up to 1919 when she was deported) speak at one of her rallies and as a consequence produced this text to a song in 1917.

This is just the last two verses of “They are There.”

When we're through this cursed war,
All started by a sneaking gouger,
making slaves of men
Then let all the people rise,
and stand together in brave, kind Humanity.
Most wars are made by small stupid
selfish bossing groups
while the people have no say.
But there'll come a day
Hip hip Hooray
when they'll smash all dictators to the wall.

Then it's build a people's world nation Hooray
Ev'ry honest country free to live its own native life.
They will stand for the right,
but if it comes to might,
They are there, they are there, they are there.
Then the people, not just politicians
will rule their own lands and lives.
Then you'll hear the whole universe
shouting the battle cry of Freedom.
Tenting on a new camp ground.

Here you will find Charles Ives singing it – really badly  – I LOVE IT

Further down the page are two other versions choral and band – both brilliant but kind of miss the vibe of the Ives original.

I really do feel a connection with Ives – sadly not his talent or genius – he was just so unencumbered by notions of appropriateness, taste, consistency, style, fashion, mood or anything – he just did his thing as it occurred to him on the day – oh how I wish!

Maria and I have been honing our craft skills somewhat obsessively .
I spent a silly amount of time building a stage for Jesus’s birth which Nonna and Maria know as a ‘Presebio.’ – nativity scene I guess. Needless to say I did not carve the figures, they are 1960/70/80’s made in Hong Kong Hong-Kong, incredibly brittle/delicate plastic figures that I think are totally brill. I bought them from E-Bay.

I like my Presebios realistic don’t you. A modernist/brutalist nativity set in the Barbican flats does not float my boat and given the subject matter and the legacy of ‘Life of Brian’ taking the piss or being ironic is miles too easy – besides Greggs nailed it last year with the sausage roll Jesus. Maria added the theatrical drape and the rock and the tree were recycled components of Arthur’s Bonsai that was left in our care which we forgot to water so it died so tried planting in the garden where it died a bit more and now it lives into eternity sprayed with varnish just like followers of Christ – so very fitting. The lucite Jesus is admittedly a bit kitsch but this if the first time we have housed a devotional object so I suppose we should give him a showing. The lighting is on a dimmer (and it really does look fab at night) and the figures are magnetised to the stable floor otherwise the meringue like material they are made from would cause them to tumble producing an unintended bacchanalian effect that could be offensive or comic – and we certainly don’t want that do we.

Next Maria has spent a similarly obsessive degree of energy collecting materials for a holly (with berries – had to have berries) and spruce arch around our door. We have captured it for posterity as in common with many of our Christmas adornments it is held up by faith and ‘command strips’ – said pair have historically been known to let us down when outside conditions turn particularly North Yorks. (If you haven’t discovered command strips yet they are great cos they leave your paint in tact when you remove them – dead clever but not cheap.)

Finally I am doing finishing touches to my Christmas web radio broadcast from the phone box scheduled for 8:00 pm on the 25th. https://k6.gravityisahat.com/wp/live-feeds/

I chose this as a particularly disruptive time for both the posh people who start Christmas dinner at eight or the common people who watch telly at eight – this way I can be sure of my martyrdom as its likely no one will be listening and I can rest comfortably on the myth of neglected geniushood that currently sustains me.

i cant stand being wished Happy Christmas, Season Greetings, have a good one, a happy new year and all that blah blah banal meaningless platitudinous bollocks so i wont – so there – suck it up – deal with it – cope – humpf. Tra..

Instead of talking about important things like Trump losing, how difficult it is to get replacement bulbs for old style Christmas lights, how Anne with an E is too emotional to watch, how two hospitals in consort forgot to send me my blood test results, how the enormous choice of bike lights is daunting, I find myself obsessing about my stupid creative projects. Should I feel guilty? Probably – but my colleagues have had proper experiences of guilt that made me realise that it’s an emotion I don’t really ever feel – (Don’t bother to ask why we were discussing it) – That said I can’t rid myself of the feeling that what I actually end up producing creatively isn’t really very good and I think I feel guilty at spending time making shite that nobody is interested in. When I was in the depths of illness it didn’t matter and I didn’t care, but now that I have got used to wearing the same tired holey, illness vest every day it has become a bit of an issue.

That’s the problem with so many ways of seeing how creative other people are.

Pinterest and YouTube are bursting at the seams with people’s creative endeavours and I have to say too many people are pretty good at it. Youth seems to be a factor- the average Etsy entrepreneur appears to be about 30, your average soundcloud contributor about 20 and your average YouTuber about 15 which is a bit depressing. Despite a sense of hopeless unlikely-to-become-famous-now-or-even-noticedness, I seem to have an overwhelming urge to try to test my creative chops by putting on shows. I can only assume that since dropping out of theatre, well really it dropped me, I am left with residual ‘show-off withdrawal’ and that manifests itself in pathetic attempts to recapture the opportunity to ‘strut my stuff’ in public in anyway I can.

So I do feel guilty at putting all this nonsense out there. I genuinely don’t expect anyone to watch or listen – I wouldn’t watch or listen to yours – that is unless you were my children or partners in which case I would because I can bask in their glories, they being my progeny and therefore by extension their art being mine. Hah! – but I feel good once it’s out there – even if no audience ever witnesses it I can move on

So here goes.

This is a video of the broadcast I made on Halloween night from ‘the red telephone box that talks a bit like me.’ https://k6.gravityisahat.com/wp/ I am glad I did it because it should help me make something better the next time – but it’s not much cop.

Here are the things I got wrong and the things I have learnt from both the live broadcast and making the video

1. Ultimately it’s quite boring and I don’t know how to fix that – I guess that’s the hard bit about art.
2. Don’t set up an expectation for one thing (in this case something scary) and deliver something else – unless it’s better than expected (this wasn’t)
3. Profit from silences and stillness. I am scared of silence and stillness so I rush to avoid them
4. Out of sync only really works when framed by in sync. Ever since being a teenager unconsciously soaking up the post 1960’s ‘everything is art and nothing is art’ philosophy, I have been enamoured by serendipity. Serendipity results in several asynchronous sections in the video, but do I like them?
5. Transitions and effects are only for the desperate – I don’t like what I did at the end but I had run out ideas and patience
6. Earnestness is off putting and comes across as fake – hmm hard one cos in a way this project is full of earnest aspirations – it’s not ever going to be Instagram friendly – let’s celebrate that at least.
7. Are you acting? If so learn to do so. Never could, never will be able act – but I enjoy trying
8. Too many ideas too quickly – very tricky as in a way this piece is boring because of long sections where nowt happens but to dress it up will fall foul of item 3
9. Randomness only works some of the time. See item 4
10. I cannot rely on controlling the audio mix to maintain attention. Yep the mix is a law unto itself due to variables I can’t control in the phone box. Mainly how close to the ear the listener holds the handset.
11. Rely most on what is said and when – this follows on from 10. The script is key and is for me is by far the hardest thing now that the tech issues are largely resolved
12. Fragment the samples – not such long chunks. The music is a relief but I need to be more sparing and cleverer with my use of it.
13. Use literal background effects sparingly. Let’s face it, the blitz sound track is embarrassing
14. Video edits are millisecond specific so take the time to get it right. Can’t be bothered just now but appreciate it should be done in future.
15. Videos need a bespoke sound design not just the live recorded performance duplicated.

The things I got right.

• Dispassionate security cameras suit the mood
• It is audio collage mainly. I think that’s the genre
• The occasional funny bits please me – I like the raspberries
• The mix of personal memories and cultural memories is a good starting point
• The three voices have potential – yep happy with that
• Making myself do the broadcasts by announcing them in advance is a good idea. I have learnt so much and feel ready for the next. So good

…Onwards

I was very pleased when I was approached by Steinar Kvia Kittilsen a masters student at Sound and Music Computing MSc at Aalborg University Copenhagen to give an interview about my favourite topic – and I was particularly pleased with the result. I think he did a great job and for once I did not come across as a complete wally (I have a back catalogue of those moments I intend to take to the grave – you know the occasions where you are determined to use big words and then discover halfway through using them that they are so big they don’t fit in your mouth). I particularly liked he’s solution to my appalling internet connection and the sync issues – “The video often freezes during the interview, but we can pretend this is on purpose to remind the audience of the artifice!”

Btw if the video preview frame from YouTube for you folk is the same as for me I really should have put my bottom set in (see below)