Emotions – BLANK CANVAS

Bank Holidays

Months pass without time to stop and think, an endless treadmill of work, gym, family, TV. As the buds of spring start to blossom, days stretch out further than Lance Armstrong’s stamina, mornings and evenings gradually blending into one. Bank holidays at Easter result in terminally long weekends. Bank holidays at the end of May result in extending this joyous month, a riot of colour and for one year only, no rain on the plain like Spain, parching the grass, concreting the soil. Another break arrives. Time to forget about the 9-5, replaced by excessively trying to catch up with all those other things which life throws uncaringly in front of you. Cleaning, tidying, sorting, moving, gardening, driving, deadening. Easter provides a break but one that defines the next stage, part two of the year. Winter is now truly behind us and beautiful bucolic times stretch ahead. The chance to watch your team lose twice rather than once over a long, long weekend. Top top players needed. So, by repeating words that means they are doubly important. We need a top top top top upgrade on all our players, manager and coaching staff. The food is good though, for the players. Fans suffer with blasted dodgy sausage rolls and overheated Balti pies. Extended weekends sometimes provide an opportunity to think about being creative, write some words, catch up on research, make music, take photographs. It always feels like the busiest time, when extra hours available are eaten by Pac Man munching creatures. Also, a time to read, books, paper, articles, to take a breath in and move forward. The pope died today after a long illness. Thoughtfully waiting until after his Sunday sermon before letting go, joining his friends in heaven and beyond, a good person by all accounts.

Bank holidays do have an end, but they are points in time where lots of people have the same time off. Not emergency or health workers, service trades or tourist spots. They are busier than normal coping with the mass of over drinking, overeating, dangerous swimming, human abandon. Time off from the daily grind. Moments which can feel uplifting and liberating if you are in a happy space, a couple, with family and friends but can be isolating, alone, watching men pot balls on a green baise, endlessly from cue tip to round object, bouncing around, trying to escape and leave nothing behind. The empty carnage from the stacked-up start of a frame. It is relaxing apparently, the heat of battle but with gentle contemplation, unfolding over time. Day after day after day. Bank holidays can change the flow of time, stop us in our tracks, Halt. Who goes there or where. Routines upended by not needing to do anything. So, we could mow the lawn, fix fittings, dump the unused wardrobe, reconfigure our spaces. Or just go for a long walk, aimlessly meandering off into the distance, not knowing when to turn round as there is no time limit. It just goes on. All is quiet in the countryside, whereas cities hum with eager anticipation, music, drink, desperate to party to ignore the upcoming slip back into tedium of normality. A release. Melancholic moments as your team finishes the season either relegated to a lower division or deep in mid table mediocrity, months of time off to contemplate the start of another cycle. New manager. New players. New kit. New hope. We start again.

End of May sparks festival season in my brain. Time to dive into the gently rotting shed and brush mildew off my festering tent. Will it appear again this year? Not yet, but in due time. preparing to stand outside in various weather forms, jigging and dancing and chatting, music wafting through the the ozone ecosystem pollen infected air. Time can finally standstill.

Creative Artists

Watching the early Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown has altered the perspective on a singer songwriter I never really understood or resonated with. I still don’t. It seems incongruous the reaction from audiences as Zimmerman announces his presence across New York and then the globe. A voice of a generation emerging from the shooting of Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis. A voice of the people who couldn’t really connect with anyone personally, relationships destroyed by his desire to create, the importance of voicing the creative product over spending time with partners. A complete blinkered drive heading one way down the highway straight to the creative space, casualties splattered on the pavement around him joining those static and rolling stones. The film doesn’t dive into his backstory, provide some sort of connectivity with family, upbringing, education or socialisation but just places Bob in Greenwich Village, with the fellow cats, shades on, cigarettes smoked. That’s how he got such a gravelly voice, alongside the passive smoke from everyone else who was lighting up. It’s what’s missing from our popular culture nowadays. No one smokes, all pop artists are generally squeaky clean, autotuned to robotic AI perfection. Dylan was anti AI although just as anti-social. In modern day New York he could open up his computer rather than searching for key changes on his guitar, speak into it, say “create a song in the style of Bob Dylan talking about how the world is heading for yet another disaster, this time with captains Trump and Musk at the controls rather than Khruschev or Nixon. A hard drives train is going to fall in place. Why are so many revered artists such c**t* in the real world. George Michael or Prince, lovely geezers. Laurie Anderson, brilliantly creative artist who still lives on her main hit O Superman, Uh uh uh uh, oh mum and dad. In a wonderful Desert Island Discs, Anderson talks about her amazing family, starring at school, the creative process and spirituality. Dylan smokes, looks moody and mumbles alongside his guitar. A great songwriter who appears to have come from outer space, inventing his own backstory, a carnival of smoke and mirrors. Someone no one will ever know.

An picture of Dismal Land, Banksy's take on a funfare

Travelling

Time disappears as you move around, nothing really going on except for the exercise of travelling. Sat on a train that traverses the country, from bottom to top and back again. You aren’t really doing anything except for being stationary whilst an element of transport moves you around. It can be possible to read or catch up on work. Stare out of the window marvelling at the grey skies shrouding any kind of view, which veers from countryside to outskirts of towns, ugly regions designed cheaply and ineffectively. Blue covered seats, thick and padded, still retaining the stench of fag smoke, from a previous era. Compartments where you peered in, slid back the door and met you new companions. Time to watch the world streak by. To watch and engage with people too. On the train you get occasional moments of excitement as you pull into cities you have never visited, places resonating with history and stature. Glimpses caught of dramatic buildings, bridges over rivers, people waiting on the platform, eager to find a forward-facing seat, building up adrenalin as they prepare for the scramble onboard. Sometimes you might be keen to talk, a new neighbour arriving with their own history to tell. Other times the needs of work or your own for solitude mean that you will other passengers to take alternative seats, squashing together like equally smelly sardines in a tin. Driving takes your mind into an alternative state. One of concentration but extreme familiarity, manoeuvring a vehicle through windy roads and wide-open motorways. Talking to your partner, listening to the latest news, sport or music, whiling away the hours as you move from one place to another. Time lost. Although it is an opportunity for Zen like behaviour, turn everything off and let the mind wander and focus. Ideas or concepts floating around and seeping into the brain. A time to think, connect the rushing lines, plan the future whilst remembering the past. You should be able to reclaim those hours spent travelling. Static but in motion. Complete a claim form to send off to the ministry. I would love to be cycling rather than driving, being active, fit, healthy and alive. Still able to pontificate but out on the path, moving from city centre, urban sprawl, the sound of the suburbs, the air gradually lightening and freshening. You can breathe more deeply now. In through the nose, out of the mouth. Travelling with a purpose rather than just existing to get somewhere else. It does get you to where you need to be, meeting with family and friends, attending a conference, going on holiday. So much time spent travelling whilst on holiday. Moving from place to place. Just stay still and enjoy the moments. Have days where you exist in your locale. The covid pandemic provided this life, a time where you weren’t allowed to travel. You had to exist in your own space, which would be a nightmare except for the privileged who had the room to feel comfortable. Finishing a journey after driving for hours can feel mesmeric, as though time didn’t move. Time apparently lost but possibly invaluable. Exhaustion gradually taking over. Arriving home but without true knowledge of the journey that got you there. I should stop flying. The planet really needs us all to do this if we are serious about attempting to reverse climate change. But we aren’t. Not until it is slap bang in front of our face, peeling away, melting, burning, flooding, collapsing. Driving an electric car whilst it would be better just to stay in your own locale. A boring world where we don’t move around but the world survives, cools down, quietens itself and lets nature come back to life. Back to reality.

Bristol to Bath cycle track

De’ath

I used to have a teacher at secondary school called Mrs De’ath. I never saw her as the harbinger of doom but just another adult with a slightly French sounding name. The innocence of youth gradually slipping to the realisation that death is all around us, shadowing our every move. On the news in our personal lives. Gunmen running amok in schools. The first part of life is generally great where you just have the odd moment of death in your life. Pet cat, extremely old grandparents, distant acquaintance at school. As you age then it gradually becomes increasingly central to your life. Mortality is up front and central. Cancer crawling around inside people, pulling rugs from lives. Kids left stranded, fending with the parent who is left. Grief rippled through their conscious and subconscious. Refugees fleeing death and risking almost certain catastrophe through cramming onto overly small boats, wobbling across the channel. Iconic and less known musicians die. They don’t go on for ever which seemed to be the case when you were growing up, Everyone was immortal. Friends phone with news of close family members. The cancer has come back, just a few weeks to live. It is something we all carry with us but reality bites hard, takes us away from moments of extreme joy dancing in fields or watching the sun gradually set over a blue, green, orange, yellow sky. Walking or cycling to work, any moment could be a slip where you fall off the pavement or the back wheel slips and death comes roaring into view. You could just stay at home, frozen in stasis, safe from harm although that meteorite heading for earth could come screaming down and finish it all for everyone. Climate change, the death of the planet is ingrown for children of today. Welcome to your world, which we have managed to f+ck. Streams of traffic stuck bumper to bumper in city after city. The world distracting itself by suggesting that they are tackling global warming. Mass queues in airports as passengers fight for connecting flights, oblivious to their part in the planet’s downfall. Pollution, poisoning millions of people daily. Invisible fumes that activate cancer cells. The old days of smoking in shops, bars, homes gone as the most direct health risk is tackled whilst leaving a whole host of others gapingly open. Food. What’s on your plate, a rainbow of colours mimicking the setting sun? Or is it just overcast and grey. Beige. The colour of death. Youth still have technicolour lives, tik tok inspired over bright gaudy flashy sickly multitude of colours whereas the ageing sit in light brown piss stinking armchairs waiting for the chance to exit. Losing their mind as friends and family gather around, a ritual as we see off one more member of our tribe.

Sunset over Glastonbury as people walk along a pathway

Communal drugs

Newton’s cradle, one ball hitting another and gradually coming in sync. People come together and get more aligned often through taking the same drugs. The neural membranes aligned due to biological transfer. It is one of those things which is still slightly taboo, to talk about drugs, even though almost everyone has broken the law at some point by taking them. It could be the relatively light, sometimes called Gateway drug, of marijuana. A spliff. A relaxant in the right amount that can support mental health, whereas the wrong kind and too much is the complete opposite. Psychotic. Paranoia. Like many things in life it is the balance which is key. I go to the gym and that place is full of obsessives. People that need the hit which exercise can give. Some of my most transcendent moments have been there. Sweating and peddling in unison at a spin class, the instructor driving everyone forward, faster, more speed, as the techno track crashes through us. Group elation, laughter. Heart rates pounding through the BPM. A giddy excitement. The after glow which is followed by a gradual come down if there is no exercise, no gym the next day. It’s a good value healthy drug. Spliffs can support your creative mind, supposedly, but also dulls it, slows the memory cortex down so that you can’t actually remember anything seconds after you thought it. Obviously, there used to be the classic munchies. Young students rushing to the nearest Spar to stock up on Cadbury’s latest unhealthy balance. There is always that balance with drugs. The doing and the after. This is what causes so much pain and disaster. Lives tipped over by excess. Ecstasy brought a generation joy through the 1990s, supported by beautiful eclectic beats, Balearic, minimal, jungle, drum and bass, youth bouncing as one, underground overground dancing free. Grinning. Gurning. The up and the space to chill, doves and water. White floaty moments in love. Tuesdays were often difficult. Tetchy, doom ridden. Fetch that spliff for balance. Go to the gym. A walk in nature. Always a good cure. Other drugs such as heroin or ketamine were brutal reminders of the disasters awaiting, people let lose from their actors, floating off to other worlds, almost beyond saving. Psilocybin’s, mushrooms, magic, psychedelic experiences provided life altering moments, changing perceptions, webbing underground, connections understood, the matrix broken through. Neural change breakthroughs could provide exciting opportunities for communal health, utilised as an anti depressant, altering pathways so that the happy genes are restored, serotonin rushing through your body, generating the impetus to head back to the gym and spin.

Sex Sex Sex

Sex sex sex well you came here to dance (Scritti Politti)

Music and sex go together like strawberrys and cream, Lennon and McCartney, Foster and Allen. Or more probably Blondie. Cool images on our walls, cut out centrefolds from NME, Smash Hits or Sounds, the new look, new love but it was always Debbie Harry who caught the imagination of a generation. Iconic and cool. Sex and music create some of the same internal feelings, warm and tingly as you filter sweep your Sequential Circuits Pro One. The moving connective rise and fall of an orchestral string section. Ibiza Chill Out classics. Leonard Cohen or Van Morrison in a Parisian flat on a sleepy Saturday early spring morning, the distant sound of vegetable or flower stalls coming to life, the dawn chorus. Sound, comfort, meditation, love. We experience a reason for being in the world, a natural connectivity through bodily integration, listening to the gradually intense breathing, the heartbeat changing from reggae, through hip hop, pop, techno to drum and bass before climaxing in hard core. Music is sex: sex is music. Sex has informed music culture, from the permissive era of the 1960s, sexual exploration and glam rock in the early 70s, to SEX the shop, punk and the pistols to New Romantics, the Aids pandemic spreading through London and New York gay scenes. Raves were about love, group hugs rather than explicitly sexual as energy went out on the dance floor. It was the parties after the events, the chill out rooms, the Sunday afternoons where thoughts of new musical ideas and sex started to reawaken. Love hope and happiness.