December music trawl trawls into January
I'll be honest, what started out as a good idea got caught in what John Lennon called life. I thought thirty-odd songs that I like and wanted to share.
Urged on by friends, spending time listening to videos on YouTube, it was a great idea. Maybe. My videos weren't that out-there, the left-field I covered didn't compare to the left-field of friends (or more correctly, I wouldn't compare my left-field videos to the awesome left-field suggested by others), and then there's life.
Life. And unfortunately life can be annoying. So maybe I shall record my December trawl with just one video, which links into something else I'll be writing about later.
King of Spain, The Tallest Man on Earth
Lindi Ortega/Doubts
Lindi Ortega is currently touring in Europe, playing live tracks from her most recent lp, Faded Gloryville. This is a good lp, I'd recommend it for a listen, Lindi is one of those artists who seemingly (for me) just go and it's good and entertaining and sings about stuff I think about.
At the Brudenell Social Club on 26 January 2016 Lindi introduced Faded Gloryville as one of those places one ends up in if they are washed up or are passing through when one is having doubts. Artists have doubts, everyone does, where they are going, what they need to do, when will their time be. While that lp is something I've listened to a number of times, watching her introduce it that way live kind of made it even more approachable.
The lovely thing about watching Lindi Ortega live is the surprises. Dancing, encores, fantastic instrument playing (the guitar sound was awesome, but that bass), just a good night all round.
The Buried Giant Review
I was given this book as a birthday present at Christmas, having spent most of the year looking forward to reading it. Now, with about thirty-forty pages left to go I find myself trying to stretch out the experience. Since I reached page 250 I've started and read about a third of Terry Pratchett's Sourcery and advanced considerably through my bus-read, Dune.
There is not much left to do. Thirty pages is a good, relaxing evening session, an hour of really intense ignore-everything reading, it's not going to take long. So it might have to be finish, break for a day or two, then crack on with reading it again.
The curious thing is I've only ever done this with a handful of books at various times in my life. When I first got reading as opposed to having reading thrust on me as a product of school, I read through Pratchett's Mort three or four times. I was about fourteen I think (rough guess) and had been introduced to the series by a rather enthusiastic uncle. The next time around it was Richard Brautigan's Sombrero Fallout.
While rereading Mort was about exploring the joy of reading, rereading Sombrero Fallout was the joy of exploring where thoughts and words can take you. Both books are fantastical, though not the same kind of fantasy, and both books feature keys and time pieces. The third book I've ever reread straight away is Bo Fowler's Scepticism Inc. I am led to believe this is a natural phenomenon which does not need exploring.
Kirkstall Spoken Word and Performance Festival
Working on Kirkstall Festival has been one of the best experiences of my life. Actually, community activism has led to some of the best and most beneficial experiences of my life, the Festival, Kirkstall in Bloom, the On The Edge Festival, all of those things have made me realise the link between myself and my community. I am firmly of the belief that one should establish that link as soon as they can and then work on it for as long as they can.
Myself, preparations for this year's Festival are underway (feels like it's been on since the day after the last one). And it will be good, packed with activities, stalls and performance. You should come, you should.
I've been thinking that beyond Kirkstall Festival's main activities there would be the potential to hold an event that focused more on spoken word and performance. Both of those are part of the main festival but I want to move them centre stage, and bring together poetry, drama, performance, comedy, story-telling, and presentations.
There's a couple of possible shapes for how this could happen. An all-in-one-day festival with multiple stages or a series of daily events linked by the theme of the SWAP. It's early days, and there's a lot of things happening, but it is a good idea that could fly.
Poetry Workshops
I've signed up to a poetry workshop run by Jen Campbell. It will be exciting to see how I do, I've always written and made notes for poems but never really forced it anywhere. There's a lot of scraps of notes of lines, serious stanzas or silly single sentences of words that amuse me. In the run up to the workshop I made an effort to do two things, firstly, I've been working on something linked to the few lines below, secondly, a draft of a full poem released elsewhere on my blog.
{Poem removed}
Is the earth flat?
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