Icarus @ 59 # 171

My writing life comes and goes in cycles by virtue of my job and that is fine. This week I have had a house full of wimin but Jess goes back to Oz today, Abbi flies off to Tuscany for a month long Oklahoma degree module on Italian Renaissance art (ooh I could volunteer for that one - imagine, four weeks in Sienna, Florence, San Gimignano - time to sigh for) and on Tuesday Whit flies home to Oklahoma after touristing out here in the UK. So, apart from some PhD supervision, I will have this desk to myself - and I already have projects mapped out to sit alongside a new song and fitness for June programme. Not a bad thing when you are planning your sixth decade... zut alors! Today the sun is shining and I am sitting at the back door drinking early grey and listening to this because it came on shuffle - thankfully - all I ask, don't tell anybody the secrets I told you...

Icraus @ 59 # 170

We live in a world of experts, there is nothing we cannot now know, isn't that the case? The internet has us switched into almost anything we would like to know. I mean I can know everything from the fact that Richard Thompson plays a Lowden guitar which I can't justify having on account of the cost, to the fact that Eleanor Marx Aveling, 16 January 1855 – 31 March 1898, also known as Jenny Julia Eleanor "Tussy" Marx, was the English-born youngest daughter of Karl and might have been murdered. I was asked recently, with all this information to hand do we really need education? Well, I guess we only have to look at the way politicians cherry pick ideas to answer that. Surely the purpose is not to talk about things we can know but to really know about the things we talk about. And by that I mean to really know them, to be able to analyse ideas and thoughts and to encourage a view of the world in which the loonies don't get to run the asylum. Alas, I sometimes think they already are, and the problem is they don't actually know they are the loonies. But forgive me, last night I went to see Lion King in London. Good clean entertainment and it made me remember that while the good guys don't always get to rise to the top, when they do they still have a job to do (and sometimes they forget this). Getting to the Pride Lands is just the start, now he has to restore them. And I look now at Syria, Afghanistan, Thailand, Uganda... places of strife and ask, how is it still possible a woman and her unborn child can be stoned to death in broad daylight because her father had the hump with her choice of husband - it starts with one but we must keep pushing against the wheel - here's Richard Thompson and his Lowden - I need you at the dimming of the day:

Icarus @ 59 # 169

I was introduced to this poem many years ago by my English Teacher at South London College. I was doing a part time A Level in English Lit at night school. It was as recent as 1987, when I was in my early thirties (before I went to the University of Sussex) and the whole experience changed my view of poetry and indeed the world. The teacher, Jane, showed us a video of Maya Angelou reading it and wow... indeed she performed it and although the clip below is less demonstrative as she was in her one woman show (which I never saw) the poem is a loud and proud production:

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may tread me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin' in my own back yard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

It changed my entire life. R.I.P., Maya Angelou, there will be few like you.

You may write me down in history

Icarus @ 59 # 168

Playing these takes time and effort - otherwise I just strum away here and there in hope that something comes from it. But I am coming to the end of a long haul of marking and writing and researching and I have plans to record some stuff I have been collecting over the past couple of years. Balancing this with a fitness regime that comes in fits and starts for the same time problems I have decided to to set up a time planner. It starts with this blog, first thing of course, followed by a run, breakfast, a working day (mostly writing from eight-thirty onwards) hmm, apart from the run, which I am just getting back into, nothing has changed. Time to think it all over again - forgive my thinking out loud here, its the only time I have to do this today. I was going to post Emmylou Harris and Steve Earle dueting on this (being as I had a duet theme going) - but this is her solo version (I think she sang it in tribute to Kate McGarrigle) and I couldn't resist it.

Icarus @ 59 # 167

Its not bicycle weather, or at least it hasn't been this past weekend, but I have high hopes for the coming weeks. But high on those hopes these past few weeks has been that the UKIP people would realise the stupidity of their little englander manifesto. Sadly this has not been the case and nearly four and a half million people have voted for them.   Also the fall of liberalism in the UK is a worry. I am not a liberal, socialism has too much of a pull on me but I have often seen them as the sensible opposition and often allies (compared to the Tories - who will have no choice but to go further right for the coming UK elections). Thus, the weather is the least of our problems and as I see Europeans lurching to the right and the rise of nationalism, even in Paris and around Europe, I really wonder where we are going. Part of me thinks - four and half million, well that's nothing, we have another fifty-six million to consider. But then again, I can see how and why this is a problem - we need to get more people to vote. One question I really want to ask (even of The Guardian) is why did the little englanders get so much coverage? For example the Greens got next to none at all, compared to last time. Its all a bit BC, bonkers-conkers, as we say in our house. My feeling is we are looking at the potential rise of a new Thatcherism unless we (all of us) wake from our political apathy.  I can't stand up, for falling down...

Icarus @ 59 # 166

Crossing the River Esk in Musselburgh reminded me that I lived along this river all my early life. I played around it, walked around it, swam in its tributaries and in Mussleburgh I watched in flow into the Firth of Forth. There is something about the connectedness of rivers, in London I headed to the Thames and I have been around some of the great rivers of the world. I guess you know where you are when you stand by them - though I have never felt compelled to jump. This is a grey old picture, yesterday was one of those Scottish days that said, 'Don't like the weather, wait five minutes, it'll change.' And change it did, though when I tried to 'run' for shelter in Newhaven, because we couldn't park nearby, were told the high security around the harbour was because the Queen was around (well, I hope she had her brolly come parasol, it was one of those days). Remember when music wasn't a polished, sterile, piece of coal but a rough diamond, mistakes and all - we were just watching the river flow, all tangled up in blue:

Icarus @ 59 # 165

Abbi in her Papa's house with a 21 balloon salute from The Broons. Diane's Edinburgh marathon over for another year, Dan safely ensconced in Brisvegas with Mike and Lynette and me, well I am just fine knowing everyone else is ok. That's the way of it. But I have been thinking - and I have been asked to write new University song which I have been thinking about too. So some work done too. And now, a slice of gluten free pizza and a glass of Sauvignon Blanc methinks - well it is Sunday afternoon (already) - slange! And this came on my iPod - I am down by the beach, serendipity:

Icarus @ 59 # 164

Dan is off to the land at the other end of the globe (which is a yellow brick road kind of story) so he has been practising being upside-down and thinking about people who speak the same language but differently. Its already strange not having him around. And we are off to Scotland where they speak the same language but a wee bit differently, with an American who speaks the same language (howdy y'all) but equally differently. 'Language...' said Aristotle, 'is said in many ways...' and that is very true. In gesture, in words, expression, pictures, signs and signals, homo fabula we are the storytelling species, its how we communicate... or as Pierre Bourdieu might have said, its our way of 'making the world'. Last week I spoke about great duets - this one with Lucinda Williams and Elvis Costello is a cracker, two people sharing the same language but disagreeing and crying jailhouse tears:

Icarus @ 59 # 163

Today I am sending Dan off to Australia where the kind hands of Mike and Lynette, Donna and Wes and Messy Jessy will pass him on as he moves around that great country - and I mean that because I love it and almost regret not taking that assisted passage all those years ago. Then on Saturday we are flying up to Edinburgh to say Happy Birthday to my Dad and Abbi who could have been twins but Abbi was born 65 years too late - and we will be taking Whitney who is over from Oklahoma, its the first time she has been out of the USA, though I suspect not the last; and finally Diane is running the Edinburgh half-marathon while we are there. It will be a busy weekend, methinks. Going back to my home town, it'll be good:

Icarus @ 59 # 162

Its been a picture time. Today my sister Debs sent me the flyleaf of a book, goodness how formal was I at fourteen. Its not something I remember but then there have been lots of Christmases in my life (I guess - and I do have four sisters and a brother, so lots of memories to remember and forget). And then this morning as I sat at my desk to open the interesting, none bill, flyer and vote for UKIP mail (because I have been in Winchester for a couple of days) the first was Potentialities by Giorgio Agamben and the other was this photograph from my good friend, Councillor Gordon Munro - ah this takes me back. I still have that cap and those specs (in fact I am wearing the specs now).  Isn't it funny how pictures bring back thoughts and memories but how inaccurate the memory can be. My memory is notoriously bad, I forget so much and I reckon its because I have never had or taken the time to actually sit down and try to remember. Maybe one day that time will come but not now. No time is busy time, always. My sister Debbie was a fan of this  lot as she became a teenager:

Icarus @ 59 # 161

Just back from a night out of these boys so Dan could say cheerio before heading off for Australia on Friday. I like being around the football team, its a great way to switch off from working and thinking. I was just telling Craig Dixon and Paul Fullylove that I have to think and read books for a living and I guess that can be difficult to get your head around. And yet they are both artists, Paul is a well established painter and is collected around the world (Satchi too - as I understand it). And Craig calls himself a welder but he is going to make me a great wrought iron gate (he doesn't know it yet) and the art and skill in welding is also a big thing, which I aim to chat to him about soon. But it was good to be out in a bar with the boys! We didn't listen to this but it might have come up:

Icarus @ 59 # 160

Making the most of the sunshine! Yesterday I worked all day on a paper for a conference in Madrid, and I was thinking about Marx when he said, 'history is nothing but the activities of man pursuing his aims...' Written here, like this, it doesn't really have any context, but it will. At the moment I am just grabbing ideas as I try to make sense of the piece I am trying to write. What it does mean is you write a lot that gets thrown away but this is just part of the process. However, every screen break and RSI break, to ease my athritic typing fingers, allowed me to sit here in the sunshine. Changing the shape of my hands, exercising my fingers to do something else, helps a great deal - and if ever anyone has seen Keith Richard's fingers you will know what I mean - gnarled old things that can play guitar but little else. Its a conscious decision, changing their shape every hour or so because come the winter they ache. So, making the most of the sunshine is necessarily therapeutic as well as fun. Every day should be like this, and I reason its good for the soul, as Hegel says, 'reason is purposive activity.' Steve Earle write's great duets every now and then, this is one of them - 'do you still have dreams, did they all come true...'

Icarus @ 59 # 159

Yesterday was a blissful Sunday, and I was thinking again about a paper I am to give in Madrid in a couple of weeks (goodness - only a couple of weeks away). In the process of thinking it through as I sat at the bottom of the garden, distracted by the temptation to just sit strumming in the sunshine, I realised that one of the great wrongs we do the world of language is our use of the word art. In its original use, the word art refers not to artworks but to the skill and the know-how by which artworks are made. Even if in most contexts we hear art as referring to the product, it is actually the practice of artists in the making. Now if we knock this idea on, we begin to understand the context of Duchamp's urinal or Worhol's soup cans and even the Coen brother's film, Inside Llewyn Davis, and the process of perception. Now this may not make huge sense, isolated here, but as the paper I am unfolding takes shape it will. As Hegel might have said, it is 'thinking translating itself into existence... cancelling and overcoming the contradiction between subjectivity and objectivity....' But that was only a small part of the day, because I watched Dan run his Heroes and Villain's run and raising £500 for African schools and also because Abbi came home from Oklahoma - the whirlwind has landed - weeeeeeee.... she loves this tune and we played it loud:

Icarus @ 59 # 158

In nineteen sixty-five, Victor Shklovsky wrote, 'art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stoney... The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar', to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged...' and there is something quite persuasive about this. Art is about making us think. Of course we have the subjective idea of what we like to see, hear or feel but what we really need is, how does it make me think. We could be passive and watch porn (for example - and I loathe porn and all it stands for, that is a personal point of view) but burlesque, or ballet, dance from my friend Debbie Lee-Anthony, now that is something different and it demands thought and participation as  thinkers. Am I a snob in this respect, I suspect so, but only because, as I have already reported (and I like this very much), 'The making of art happens not in a temple but in the mess of real flesh-and-blood lives and loves.' I am inclined to think that NOT making art (and I speak for personal experience) makes us grumpy. I find I need to do something, even if its just writing a line or a chorus that will never become a song as I strum late at night. Every day, I strum, or think about a line, or write a pencil description, or think about the story I am writing now, to think about the article, to think about the ideas I am pursuing, every single day of my life, every single day. Most of the time it leads nowhere, but it keeps me thinking about the process of perception as an aesthetic end in itself... for whatever you do, for whatever its worth.. don't waste your time... make every word hurt:

Icarus @ 59 # 157

Thinking about life the right way up. I now know this piece (left) should be hung, thus - glad that is straightened out. Then again straightened out is the wrong word here because if it could speak it might say, 'I am in my elements and hanging as I feel is right for me,' for today is International LGBT Day and the right to be straight, curly, topsy-turvy, upside-down, inside out and any damn well you please is just and right among consenting adults. But of course, saying this in a free country like ours is easy, or at least it has become so through time. Others in other parts of the world are less fortunate - Africa has a particular problem. The annual International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHOT) celebration began in 2004 to mark the 1990 decision by the World Health Organization to remove homosexuality from its rosters of disorders (goodness - a disorder). The acclaimed Nigerian author, Chimamanda Adichie rebutted the claim that homosexuality is "un-African." Commenting on the passage of the Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act in Nigeria in January 2014, she said: "If anything, it is the passage of the law itself that is ‘un-African.’ It goes against the values of tolerance and ‘live and let live’ that are part of many African cultures." At the very heart of this is the African philosophy of the self, ubuntu, the ideal that can be loosely translated as, ‘a person is only a person in relation to others’. Prejudices of any kind hinder potential in those persons and hinder basic human rights. So, in the spirit of these things, Happy IDAHOT. Labi Siffre wrote this in 1984, inspired by film footage of young Africans being shot in the head by white policemen, but also from his own experience of being homosexual, something inside so strong... We're gonna do it anyway...

Icarus @ 59 # 156

The older I get, the more I read and the more I read only leads me to suggest I know so little. I thought being an academic would mean I would accumulate knowledge but it doesn't work that way. It works more like a distillery, you refine and refine and refine, distilling as you go, maturing it over time, until the field of literary barley becomes a fine cut glass of single malt. Unfortunately, you have to endure a lot of dodgy whiskey along the way, sipping at ideas that otherwise shouldn't really have made their way into the glass - at least that is how it feels. And at the moment I can't say what stage I am at because there is no litmus test. I mean I might think I am a poitín or poteen, when someone else thinks I'm a Bells (which I would be happy with) even though I really want to be something more exotic. But then you find  something else happens, you are busy playing the metaphor and discover that the discipline has turned from whiskey to fine wine and the discourse has changed... this song is about making whiskey and stuff:

Icarus @ 59 # 155

I was sent this picture yesterday and I like it. It is a picture of a 3D collage (by the look of it) and I like the way it has been cut and pasted into its box. I am not actually sure this is the way it hangs or whether that matters. And yet that idea of whether it matters suddenly had me thinking about something Marcel Proust once wrote about what matters and of nostalgia, "Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were." I have been accused of being nostalgic in this blog, and I suppose I am to an extent. Thus it seemed natural that I did some research on it (and also because I am writing a paper for a conference in Madrid and nostalgia comes into it). Giorgio Agamben writes, "Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialisation, their becoming possible once again." It is a re-writing in our own image, the potentialisation of what was and could have been as it comes to be refracted in our own mind's eye. And that is what this guitar collage says to me, for it is not a guitar at all but a remembrance made up of the component parts which I can assemble in my head to be really real. In other words, I can see the possibilities, I can see the story of what it is/was and what it can be. Music does that for me too and Dear Someone, by Gillian Welch, I'll build a boat, steady and true... has just got to be about guitars and possibilities (and I love the guitar David Rawlings is playing on this, its a 1935 Epiphone Olympic which would be pretty well rubbish in anyone else's hands but it suits their sound). Restoring possibility to the past... completing what never was, it also rings with the lyrical future of nostalgia, does it not? 

Icarus @ 59 # 154

The promise of sunshine and the arrival of summer at long last does have a knock on, feel good effect, or at least it should. But for some reason the BBC Radio 4 news this morning has been dangling the British National Party, UKIP and problems with Muslims in Birmingham schools, all in different articles and I can't help wondering why. Indeed, the British tabloid press seem to be doing a good deal of them and us headlines (not that I ever read them) and its a curious agenda based on mistrust and bigotry. I live in a very liberal town - currently the only town in the UK with a Green council and standing MP. It also has an ongoing Arts Festival and a vibrant Open House art trail but all year round it has a vibrant performing arts feel about it, can it be that rose tinted glasses are given out at the gate? Or do we just exercise tolerance of difference better than most? I really don't know the answer to that but I do know that today I will tidy my study, organise the PhDs I supervise, and then start organising my own writing for the coming summer, in the safe knowledge that my neighbours will tolerate my being a foreigner on English soil - as the clouds give way, its about seeing the whole of the moon. 

Icarus @ 59 # 153

I have come to realise that newspapers are the conduits of our fickle nature, pages about Nigerian rebels parading 'liberated' girls vie for space alongside Marina Abramovich suffering for her art - she put out 72 objects on a trestle table and invited the public to use them on her, one was a loaded gun (hmm) while whole sections are devoted to the worship of sport. This is not a judgement, the newspaper in question is vibrant and wordily worthy and thought provoking but it says much about us as human beings where we can segue way between the important and the trivia, pooling the information into different sections of out consciousness. This morning I paused to think about that and wonder how much I need to read and retain and how much I really ought to skip. Then again, I read somewhere that grace is when you suddenly see the world spinning around something greater than you and perhaps that is what I am looking for - to which I can ask, I wonder if Icarus looked down when he was flying, or if he just looked at the horizon which never got any nearer. I did my best to notice... close your eyes, clear your heart...  are we human, or are we dancer... we love to blast this in the car

The Killers - Human from Shiddidonem on Vimeo.

Icarus @ 59 # 152

One of those days, too much to do and too little time in which to do it; one of those days, one of those days, gone by in  a blur, gone in a haze, one of those days that just zipped away... one of those days for learning to fly then flying away.

Icarus @ 59 # 151

I am not so vain that I put my initials into a mosaic path for all to see as they passed them by. Actually, I snapped this on the walk between Santa Monica and Venice Beach. It was serendipitous stumble across the unexpected. And doesn't that happen a lot? One minute you are strolling six thousand or so miles from home and then suddenly something triggers a thought, and action, an idea, or in this case, serves to flatter. Of course I share these initials with many - and probably the person who laid the path - but its odd that I should travel so far to stumble upon it. Writing is like that, when asked how come he wrote so many songs, Bob Dylan once said, 'They are just there, hanging around, I am just there to pluck them out of the trees.' Its waiting for that moment and being aware that at any moment a given idea, a story, a song will be there, what you have to do is make sure you have the time to develop it. Of course time is the great problem in modern life, hence why I have a notebook full of unfulfilled ideas, although I have done ok. But it also means that at a given time, there will be one big project to be done and so I have such a project bubbling at the moment. Will it get written? Time will tell but I hope so. And so for the time being, I am about to have breakfast and then hit the supermarket, the thirty-five locusts who swept through our house last week (celebrating Diane's fiftieth birthday) stripped it bare of all provisions, wine, water and washing up liquid. So basic provisions required - onwards, I will be listening to my new ideas as I walk down the aisles. Maybe I will wear my iPod and listen to this, so I can run around picking up provisions at breakneck speed and still hear some fab virtuosos:

Icarus @ 59 # 150

Its five-thrity in the morning, zzzz, having been glued to my desk for days I am now spending Saturday in Winchester, encouraging potential new students to choose our University. Its not much of a chore, I like seeing them in their eagerness, in their look that says, life is just about to change, its the next best thing to nurturing your own children as they grow into adulthood and actually the best thing about the job - well that and researching and writing which is different again. So on this wet, Saturday morning, while the cats chase a huge spider around the kitchen floor, I am drinking the early grey, getting ready for the drive and listening to this while the house sleeps.

Icarus @ 59 # 149, swearing revisited

Swearing part 2: okay, I got over this morning's pastoral view and  admit the world needs a good swearing at sometimes. Like when you lose to your son in the best of three at table tennis while on holiday (bugger it - he couldn't do that when he was 12) - at least it was 2-1 (and I had my dodgy leg - though he played in flip-flops, sigh). But he's left-handed and so can be a bit sneaky (and he wasn't that at 12 either). But that's not it, really. Exasperation at so many things drive us crazy and sometimes only a good swear will ease the tension. Now Dan likes a good old rant and he is not averse to a curse every now and then. His vloggin has already begun to reflect this and he likes this song, which makes you want to curse, doesn't it? Go on, let it out, #$£@ it all! So many people need a good swearing at!

Icarus @ 59 # 149

When someone like a Russian president or my own prime minister (no caps for either title) tells me I cannot swear I guess I could get pretty annoyed. The said Russian has incurred the wrath of the world's liberals for such an edict - quite right too, though on a personal level I am not sure I mind. Of course its a necessary thing for all, hammer missing nail and hitting thumb comes to mind, but I swear, too often, its lazy on my part and I wish I didn't. And yet someone has already said something to me about that. Once in a moment of carelessness I let a swearword slip in front of my Dad who said, and I still remember the precise words, 'Hey sir, that's pit talk. You don't talk like that in the house.' Pit talk, words used underground and away from the ears of wives and babes, what a different world it must have been, and yet he was firm in keeping the two worlds apart - especially in his advice to me, to, 'work on the surface...' which of course I strive to do (no hidden depths in my work). And last night we had a chat, my Dad and me. By TXT! He has a new phone and I sent him some pictures and then we TXT about the football. I have this cough and talking on the phone is nigh on impossible but I will call his new mobile today and make sure TXTing is just a way of swapping pictures (I sent him the one above as a reminder of the day he, Alex Sharp and I visited the Kelpies) I am going up to see him on his birthday with Abbi because the y(almost) share the day and I am looking forward to it very much and thinking about it makes me nostalgic.

Icarus @ 59 # 148

Living in a city you have to make the most of the tight garden space - as well as making space for guitars - so this combination of some new decking adorned with a resonator guitar works well. As you might surmise, I am still in summer anticipation mode, even though I have a lot of work to do. That's because this corner is the last place in the garden to get the sun. Ah, now you can see, smart thinking, end of the day, writing done and time for a quick strum and a glass of lemonade (well maybe something cold) before the sun finally drops out of the sky - oh aye, nae flies on me. And I have also found this amazing new mandolin tutor on Youtube which I can strum along to as well and its a real bonus. I have never had a music lesson in my life and this is the next best thing. I am looking forward to playing some jigs and stuff. I have already learned how to play this - the little riff after each verse is amazingly effective and yet so simple:

Icarus @ 59 # 147

I guess this is the commonly perceived view of the academic's summer, warm days at the back door, pottering around but of course its not quite so. In fact summer is the time when you do the work that teaching relies on. Research and writing and moving your own subject area forward are all very important. Just yesterday afternoon I was sent some details of a three day conference in Wellington, NZ, this coming November, a long way to fly to give a twenty minute paper and then to be back in time to teach. The body will have no idea where it is. I have heard it said by an Australian colleague of mine that jet lag is where your body arrives and your soul still has to catch up. Its a good thought for the day because if we think about it, its not just jet lag where this happens; I am sure we all have those moments when we need to just stop in order for our body and soul to get back into sync. I know I do, last night I slept for eight and a half hours, practically unheard of - I inherited my mother's sleep clock (among other things) - things are still not in sync but they will be soon and I am already starting to work out my 'new' running programme, now that the old leg will take it. So the summer plan is already starting, fit body for fit and proper thinking. Being fit does that, it stimulates the body and the brain works better - at least I find that. And it will be needed because I have a summer of writing planned. This song always makes me feel summerly, temporarily traveling and the fun of a sunny break, oh your a mean old daddy but I like you:

Icarus @ 59 # 146

Ah the peaceful idyll, a bench, a guitar in the sun and a carefree life... but its back to Winchester today and the reality of the long drive, the dusty office, the meetings, it will be fine, it usually is but the pull to the back door is a tempting one. Its 6 a.m. in the morning and I am already on the move... time for twelve cellos and a quick departure:

Icarus @ 59 # 145

A new guitar player's chair for the patio outside the back door. Well at least that's what I am claiming it is. But it is actually a fantastic piece of work from some guys under the viaduct who recycle wood and make stuff like this - I love it, the craftmanship, the joints and the shape of it. And it fits perfectly, sit in the middle, pull up a guitar, put on a hat and shades and off you go. Sunday mornings through the summer will never be the same again and as the the dusk settles and a glass of wine beckons the same seat still has major attractions, its an early morning, through the day, early evening seat, haven't read a book on it yet, but hey, there's time. And maybe even time for a mandolin:

Icarus @ 59 # 144

I snapped this picture through a gallery window in San Francisco and it is the boy Icarus, wings attached and the sun tattooed on his back. I can't say I like it much. I am not sure about those wings and the way its framed but we are allowed to make such aesthetic judgements, are we not. The Open House thing in Brighton doesn't make it a Biennale by the Sea because its essentially a sale, but it does allow you to see a lot of art in a different setting and context. I live in the middle of the Fiveways route and I don't have to walk far (indeed there are three houses in my street). Of course there is also the Open House pub which is a splendid 
place for lunch and a browse and I might waddle down there at some point today, seeing as its a long weekend. It can all be a bit of a lottery, each house has some 6-8 artists and they can be a mixed bag but sometimes something will stand out. We have a couple of ceramic tiles which I like but also a Carousel and anyone reading this blog knows I love seeing them wherever I go. These pictures don't do them justice because they are snapped on my phone (a couple of minutes before posting this). But they give some idea. The tiles are about 6 or 7 inches and the carousel is about 18 inches and it catches all kinds of light and casts shadows depending on the time of day. But me, I walk on the bright side of the road - desk dancing music, yay:

Icarus @ 59 # 143

Saturday in the sunshine and it feels like summer is just around the corner. It has been a long time coming. And the first signs it has arrived is the Brighton Festival kicks off today and the banners for the Open Houses are already up. Its not just a Brighton thing, of course, but loads of artists in Brighton turn their houses into small galleries so they can sell their art. But what it means is people like me can have Sundays, wandering the streets and popping into houses to view a great deal of fantastic work. I have bought some over the years, around 6 or 7 pieces and they are displayed around the house simply because I like them. In fact as I sit in the kitchen, writing this (while sipping the early grey) I can see two pieces, one of which is pictured top right and is a favourite. Its by Kate Lulham who lives next door to me. I don't wear my iPod as I wander around the houses but if I did I might listen to this John Prine song - broken the speed of the sound of loneliness, just because I like a bit of country:

Icarus @ 59 # 142

This picture is the first draft of Bob Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone. I know these things are supposed to look momentous and solemn and gild edged but the truth is most songs are written on scraps of paper, anything to hand really and I love the way these sheets have been doodled over and are in state of creative chaos. They are to be auctioned at a great price and will probably be framed and exhibited. While I would like to see them (I guess) I am not hung up on memorabilia like this, or even paying way over a real  price for a guitar just because someone famous played it. I remember once a telephone bidder paying a fortune for the piano John Lennon wrote and recorded Imagine on, only to be disappointed to find it it wasn't the white baby grand in the video but a grubby upright that sat in the corner of Abbey Road studio. Made me chuckle that one. But one thing we can't escape - this is a great song and I love this version, some say it changed pop music because it broke the 3 minute barrier, can't say it felt like that at the time I just remember the buzz and the energy, how does it feel:

Icarus @ 59 # 141

Claiming football is poetry may be stretching a point but moments like these are indeed poetic. The sun dropped, dusk turned to night, the floodlights picked out diamond droplets of dew on the grass and grown men celebrated a season of hard work. It harks back to an earlier, pre-computer age which is timeless; these are working men,  making their own way, turning up in another town after a day's work welding, building, fixing, lifting, shifting, recycling and the rest, carrying their own boots, strips and shin pads under their arms; football is a release and an escape and a way of leaving work behind. They don't get paid, they pay to play and yet sitting with them all in the changing room before and after the game you could see how much it all meant to be part of the team. I had to make decisions on their behalf, but the subs didn't mind being on the bench and those who were subbed didn't mind coming off because it was a team effort and they knew we had a plan to win. I am standing on the edge of the picture, proud of every one of them and glad they let me share it,

Perhaps pretending you never saw the eyes

Of grown men of twenty five
Who all followed as you walked...
Or kissed you on the cheek...

So if you don't lose patience with my fumbling around
I'll come up singing for you even when I'm down

where's Lord Byron when you need him for a poem - but then there is Janis Ian...