Yesterday I went to 'From the Picturesque to the Demolished' an evening of video and performance organised by Jon Purnell and Julika Gittner. On the way down I found myself suffering from ticket anxiety. It often happens on the Lowestoft line. I join it from a one-track abandoned station and often the guard fails to get round the train before he/she inexplicably abandons us at Ipswich. I then sit surrounded by threatening signs until we arrive in London. I know I deserve a ticket and will probably not be forced to pay a huge fine for defrauding National Express but it doesn't stop my fear as I explain myself at the ticket office.
I arrived at the Railway Tavern on time after a refreshing meal at Burger King (it was that or Subway) These were the only places to eat at the entrance to the 2012 athletes' village. The event start had been postponed because Arsenal were playing Hull on the big screen. Passions were running high. One vocal drinker had a huge accumulator finishing on Hull beating Arsenal so I sat where I could watch that and a showreel of videos. The art mostly lost out to the colour, noise and spectacle of the football although Victoria Melody's stroppy 'Bastard Bee' stood out.
I had intended to introduce myself to Jon but I wasn't sure who he was and by the time I'd worked it out the event was about to start and he was busy, and I had been conspicuously sitting around for so long that I felt a bit of a tit so I went to the bar for another pint.
The bar filled with a new clientelle of arty types, a woman fainted and an ambulance called. A young woman I'd met on the internet introduced herself (not as seedy as it sounds although I did manage to blush for the first five minutes) She showed me a new article in AN about The Black Flag Game which looked really good but the evening had started.
It was a friendly, pleasantly shambollic event with leaflets, speeches and presentations and a dodgy dvd player. The feelings for the loss of Angel Cottage were sincerely expressed and the work looked interesting but I missed the second half as my last train left at nine. As I ran out the door Sonya said she'd facebook me to tell me how it all turned out.
On the train home a woman sitting opposite me was trying to learn Hebrew and reading psalms. One line read: "My zeal wears me out"
I think the meeting went ok although I made the mistake of arriving too early and filling the gap with beer. The appointed location was the Commercial Tavern in Shoreditch. Admittedly I manage to feel out of place in most places but this highly mannered dark rococo hostelry, although very friendly, tested my chameleonic abilities to their limits. I might as well have been wearing a sign sayin "old, ugly, untrendy and awkward." Mark and Lesley arrived before I got too incoherent and we went over the magazine's aims and the stuff I had sent them. I don't think they were too impressed by my writing but they did like the film and my very vague ideas about developing some sort of text based computer game. I shouldn't suggest things when I am drunk, I have no idea how to make a text based computer game.
I'm traveling again tomorrow, heading off for a meeting about this new online magazine Refutation. The launch date has been put back a bit which I'm not too upset about as I'd only just begun to cobble together something approaching ok. I'm meeting Mark in a pub in Shoreditch although we haven't decided on how to recognise each other; maybe looking lost and hesitant will be enough. So far I've come up with a sort of rambling text about the technological devices I own which lead up to one of my filmic attempts to recreate the universe. I suppose they deal with connections between: technology and human experience and the world which almost responds to the brief I was given. As usual I feel stupidly nervous about the whole thing.
Alex!! felt so slow in the head today that I forgot to ask if you were still up to Nottingham? If so, then I think I am going for it, stay the night in that hotel you mentioned and head back on the saturday….do you want to come along? and yes I can be your escort………….Hx
So hotel and escort booked I headed north on Friday. Hayley was driving using her newly borrowed satnav. I loved it, or her, a slightly condescending lady of indeterminate age (the sat nav, not Hayley) who kept us almost entertained for the whole journey. She beeped repeatedly if we went too fast and was extremely calm when we appeared to leave the road entirely. I'd sworn blind that I had stayed at the Nottingham Ibis before but I clearly hadn't, it wasn't where I remembered and it looked completely different. Still once we had staggered down the inexplicably swaying corridors and I had prised our twin beds the regulation six inches apart the room seemed very nice indeed.
We found the gallery easily and spent the first few minutes eavesdropping conversations about untimely evictions and vol au vents while manoeuvring ourselves in front of the fan. There was drink; lager, cava and wine, much drink, too much drink. The show itself was friendly, it had similarities to the Studio Voltaire show but was not as cool, more humour, variety, colour and frivolity. There was a bizarre sequinned toy tigerskin rug which would have sneaked into a school craft fayre and a rather magnificent injured giant rabbit slumped on the floor. My favourite things were Bruce Ingram's two fabulous mythological assemblages made out of paint trays and magazine cutouts.
After a while we introduced ourselves (well Hayley did) chatted, got directions to a show at the Fame Factory, drank more drink and took Hayley's drawings off the wall before beating a hasty retreat into the night.
Later we finished off a bottle of wine while watching a serial killer film. We never found the Fame Factory, probably because Hayley insisted on calling it the foam factory.
I'm not going to write about the next day, as I'd prefer to forget all about it.
