For those who hadn’t quite realised, the apple cart festival was cancelled due to problems they were having in the run-up. You should have recieved news of this from them if you bought tickets by now.
We’re not scheduled to be in the Victoria Park appendix to the Apple Cart either; more Chip Shop dates to come later in the year though!
‘The Neglected Interviews’ is now on sale in Artwords Bookshop on Broadway Market, which many of you will know as London’s benchmark arts bookshop. So those of you who have been asking where you can see it in the flesh can now get hold of your copy here:
The London Word Festival team have put up loads of wonderful pictures from that seminal evening of entertainment, Keep Printing and Carry On at STK. Darren Hayman, Jo Neary, and Murray Macaulay all in collaboration with the Henningham Family Press. And if that wasn’t enough, Universettee with guest mini-lecturers Sophie Mackay and David Barnes…
If you follow a pencil carefully, from the moment it is created from the wood of a tree that grew by a Czech lake which you once saw through the train window while on your way to Vienna where a waiter then used that pencil to write down your order, to the moment when that pencil rots hidden under other garbage in a landfill, the pencil will have accumulated a rich biography which might include lying on a shelf, copying totals from utility bills and passing into the hands of a businessman flying to Seattle by plane, where it is picked up by someone who in his childhood used to swim in a Czech lake.
Each object has its own narrative, connecting to the world at different junctions. John Baldessari once said that everything is connected in some way. In one of his word chains, he asked someone to construct a story from a single photograph. The words in the story were then written down consecutively in a chain and finally replaced with images. While following each chain, I wondered what story led to the links between each consecutive word. Some links were obvious: “grass, cow, fence”. Others such as “cucumbers” followed by “phone numbers” were not self-evident, as if prompting one to create connections between them.
Out of curiosity, I wrote my own word chain, selecting words through association. I starting out with dust that’s settled on top of my computer screen and writing down the first association that came to mind as quickly as possible. The list is limited to 100 words:
dust
fluff
cloud
fog machine
strobe lights
beat
high-hat
bell
tower
Rundetarn
pancakes
spotlights
velvet
darkness
dawn
dungeon
Wagner
chords
tent
acrobat
Wings of Desire
grafitti
train
Berlin
Alexanderplatz
station
stationery
ink
glue
honey
tea
pot
melting pot
land
construction
crane
sea
bird
Columbus
ship
cargo
night
noise
window
lamp
hotel
painting
Impressionism
frame
museum
lions
steaks
Coca-Cola
billboard
traffic
highway
Route 1
Atlantic Ocean
oil
explosion
Zabriskie Point
desert
skull
bones
Space Odyssey
waltz
chandelier
Adolf Loos
cobblestones
wheel
carriage
lantern
fire
water
drop
sink
kitchen
geranium
clay
mud
swamp
Vietnam
bodies
stacks
paper
crates
piles
warehouse
factory
reactor
My link from “dust” to “reactor” extended to 98 words, whereas in another chain it may take none. If I were to start another chain with the same word tomorrow it would follow a different path. Tapping into the vast network of invisible connections, each word chain records passing associations and fleeting thoughts.
As things are bound to be connected even if in very circuitous ways, the above list of words can almost be seen as a set of clues in a detective novel in which their connections are discovered. Did architect Adolf Loos ever visit the Rundetarn, a former astronomical observatory in Copenhagen? What did Alexanderplatz in Berlin look like in 1968, the year when 2001 Space Odyssey was made? Where can one find geraniums nearest to Zabriskie Point, a location in Death Valley National Park in California?
It seems easier to find the answers to the above questions to than to draw up questions about other more oblique connections, which can sometimes become manifest through images
Dust in the Arizona desert
The cubic facade of the Villa Müller designed by Adolf Loos in 1930
The Rundetarn, built in the 17th century as an astronomical observatory, has a 7.5 turn helical corridor leading to the top.
Scenes on board the spacecraft in 2001: A Space Odyssey were shot by moving the film set into a giant ferris wheel, which would rotate while the actor walked in tandem with its motion.
The building of the Alexanderplatz in 1968, the year when 2001: A Space Odyssey was released.
Zabriskie Point in Death Valley, California.
A film still from the famous finale in Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, showing a spectacular explosion that occurs in the imagination of the main character.
Chip Shop on stage before broadcast
Making preparations with Ian McMillan and the producer
Simon Armitage choosing his Chip Shop word; ‘homunculus’
We are having to pull out of the book fair advertised for today, Ping* is on maternity leave now, and I’m going to have to stay with her today instead.
Sunday 16th May 2010, 12noon FREE
96-98 Pentonville Road, N1
We’ve been invited to host a stall at a book event called Work in Progress, at the Lexington. For people who have asked when they’ll be able to come and browse through a copy of the Neglected Interviews, this is a good time. Many of our other titles will also be there to look at and buy.
NB, this is not an appearance of the Chip Shop
Work in Progress on the facebook
We had a great time last night, broadcasting the Chip Shop as part of a live edition of the Verb from the BBC Radio Theatre. Our dictionary lies in great need of repair after being put through its paces by the wonderful verb audience. Their favourite words are obviously almost part of the family. One lady asked what will happen to all the words that were not chosen.. I assure you madam that we will find good homes for them, we never put a good word down.
You can listen again to the show, or indeed for the first time, here
Ian McMillan suggested the word Kneppel; that rings a bell. Simon Armitage chose ‘Homunculus’, a big word to describe a small man. Richard Hawley chose ‘thigmotaxis’, a barman pointed out to him that this phenomenon applied to both insects and man; only lunatics and coppers sit in the middle of a deserted saloon bar. And our final guest selected the vowel-rich ‘pianola’.
People who enjoyed the Chip Shop on the Verb may also enjoy:
The Erroneous Disposition of the People, an anthology of poetry and prose based around the contents pages of Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica
The Neglected Interviews, a seminar held on the nuts and bolts of alternative arts practice.
So it emerges that Nick Clegg has been a Samuel Beckett fan all along. I couldn’t help wondering what an election scripted by Beckett would look like:
The stage light slowly illuminates a rocky plateau. Buried in pebbles up to their necks are BROWN, CLEG and CAM.
BROWN. Finished, all finished now. Old Brown’s gone down, down to the ground.
CLEG. The old parties.
CAM. Yes, the old parties, the old times, just as it was back on the playing fields, the old times, boat rocking slowly under Magdalen Bridge, the old times, the old days. Why can’t things be like they used to be?
BROWN. Finished, all gone, a disaster.
CLEG. There they go again.
CAM. The old days, the old times, the old parties, tra-la-la-la-la. Why can’t I be Prime Minister?
All three sink further into the stones. A spotlight reveals a hung parliament, festooned with paper MPs.
BROWN. All is lost. Woe, woe!
CAM. Why can’t I be Prime Minister? I want to be Prime Minister!
Enter VOTERS.
VOTERS. Let’s go.
Nobody moves.
Beckett’s endings provide us with a range of possible responses to electoral outcomes. The novel The Unnameable ends with the resigned but ambiguous ‘you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ from the unnamed narrator. This is rather more stoical and less hysterical than the Tories’ ‘We can’t go on like this’. At the close of Endgame, all Hamm can be certain of is his handkerchief - the ‘old stancher’ - which survives. Dry your eyes, Dave. You too, Gordon.
With all the uncertainties of the current political environment, Beckett leaves us, like poor Winnie who still sings while buried up to her neck at the end of Happy Days, to face the music and be grateful. As the wise (or not) journalist said, ‘The only certainty here is that everything is uncertain’.
We’ve recently made three seperate bespoke portfolios, each demonstrating different methods of putting loose pages in a beautiful cloth covered case. Below is the classic portfolio with card flaps, covered in fine French yellow Tex Libris cloth. This is perfect for loose sheets of paper.
We were asked to print some envelopes and correspondence stock to be given as a gift, and to find a way of presenting them. We made this cloth case,
Inside, we made these expanding paper pockets - perfect for holding in the envelopes and sheets of paper as it gets used up.
A fashion designer wanted us to create a portfolio using easily reshuffled plastic pockets,
We used metal binding posts and a cloth hinge to create this strong portfolio, and we hid the fixings under a cloth flap.
With our paper drill we can also put in stacks of bespoke printed single sheets, independant of plastic pockets. Both can be removed and updated by unscrewing the binding posts, and they can be extended to fit the number of pages.
You are welcome to email us with enquiries if you need to create a portfolio for presenting your work, as a gift, or to keep items like letters and photos together.