Good Morning Mr Tom

Full of Summer

2010-08-14T10:57:00.000+01:00

This is the full of summer, this is all
Bold bumblebees have always dreamed about;
This floating is my rise that has no fall;
This steadiness my in that has no out.
And this my body's happiness -- the call
Persuading me to pause deep in today
As purple clover scents the swaying air
Bold bumblebees have always dreamed about.
I watch more ripeness ripening the way
A whirling orange blur of oriole
Blends with lake water blazing everywhere;
A hummingbird suspended at a rose
As if in mimic of the sun whose flare
Holds her eternal moment in my mind.
This is my opening that has no close;
This is my now with then now left behind
And icy wind a thought thought can forestall:
This is the full of summer, this is all.

Robert Pack

Save your day (Jose Gonzalez)

2010-08-14T10:53:00.001+01:00

Sunscreen!

2010-04-13T01:44:00.000+01:00

Transits of Venus (for Anne Marie)

2010-03-22T21:07:00.002Z

Vancouver airport. I have crossed this space before,

leaving lovers -- a small planet moving slowly

over a vast and polished floor, circled by strangers.

Beyond the lounge window, grey skies, grey tarmac.

Straight white painted lines plane off across

the wide-winged delta and intersect the arc

of the horizon. I watch a train of luggage carts

cut a tangent towards me, towed through a bubble

of silence -- sound severed from me by glass --

and think of moon buggies, vehicles designed

to cross the surface of a satellite, exploring flat

grey plains, Mare Oscularum, Mare Incognita.

Transits of Venus occur perhaps too often

in my life. the inner planets, small separate

circles, cross the blazing surface of the sun

and then separate, depart to shine alone,

the wandering ones together only for a time,

contained by the bright circumference of love.

Alice Major

London Silence

2010-03-22T18:48:00.002Z

Fountain Court, Temple, London, 1921

"The history of silence is one of London's secrets. It has been said of the city that its most glorious aspects are concealed, and that observation is wonderfully well fitted to account for the nature of silence in London. It comes upon the pedestrian, or traveller, suddenly and unexpectedly; it momentarily bathes the senses, as if going from bright light into a darkened room."

Peter Ackroyd, London - The Biography

March morning unlike others

2010-03-09T21:47:00.002Z

Blue haze. Bees hanging in the air at the hive-mouth.
Crawling in prone stupor of sun
On the hive-lip. Snowdrops. Two buzzards,
Still-wings, each
Magnetized to the other,
Float orbits.
Cattle standing warm. Lit, happy stillness.
A raven, under the hill,
Coughing among bare oaks.
Aircraft, elated, splitting blue.
Leisure to stand. The knee-deep mud at the trough
Stiffening. Lambs freed to be foolish.

The earth invalid, dropsied, bruised, wheeled
Out into the sun,
After the frightful operation.
She lies back, wounds undressed to the sun,
To be healed,
Sheltered from the sneapy chill creeping North wind,
Leans back, eyes closed, exhausted, smiling
Into the sun. Perhaps dozing a little.
While we sit, and smile, and wait, and know
She is not going to die.

Ted Hughes

Shining Light

2010-03-07T19:07:00.003Z

You are a shining light. You light up my life.

Perhaps my favourite 90's anthem, by a forgotten band called Ash. Combined with my love of submerged swimming in dappled light, weightless and free, could it get any more uplifting?!

Fuzzy

2010-02-20T00:47:00.001Z

Montmartre dusk, Paris, October 2009

Night Breeze

2010-02-20T00:29:00.001Z

Unexpectedly the windows open
Wide during the night. The rectangle
Swallows the bedroom, it's a different night where
Life turns inside out like a glove. A veined hand
Emerges, leaf of a negative
Hope on the phantom wall
Pointing towards what? The cliff of a lake
Sea-snows, lunar suns. A rough but tender
Tongue darts from it, paying no attention
To the guard-rails of speech.
Come unstuck, drawings, framed mirrors
The scribblings of the world
Slip from the walls docile and unafraid
Their fibers will be ripped.
A lamp gleams its star's hope in their wake
The sheets knot themselves for an escape
Exchange close body heat
For the sweet cold freedom of the clouds.

Claire Malroux
Translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker

Cool

2010-02-20T00:08:00.008Z

Falling asleep in the snowscape of the big double-bed
I wrap my hand around your hand until they catch fire

And the snow begins to melt and we sink down and down

Michael Longley - Snow Hole

This ethereal glass house, designed by the Santambrogiomilano group, has nothing to hide. Cool and clear, hidden in a snowy forest, I imagine climbing into that bed at night and watching the constellations spin and Northern Lights dance above me. Ice ice baby.

Heartless

2010-02-11T23:21:00.003Z

Reminds me of being dumped by a Welsh wonder Bjork look alike called Kathryn when I was 14. Teenage angst and exercise book doodles!

Sweet Disposition

2010-02-01T21:50:00.006Z

Driving along the south coast near Brighton on Sunday, low winter sunshine and roaring waves, with a sudden first glimpse of the Seven Sisters chalk cliffs. And then this on the radio, making the car melt into the blue.

Mind Pop

2010-01-16T17:06:00.003Z

Maybe it's because I was a kid when the internet didn't exist. Maybe because I dreamed of being able to record and edit films and sound. Play around with photos. Mix records like a DJ. Publish stories and thoughts. To do any of these things in the 1980s was way beyond my reach, so I made do with making mix-tapes, learning darkroom skills and typing my own magazines in my bedroom.

I still don't take for granted the power and beauty of what is available to anyone with a laptop, internet connection and digital camera. The unleashing of creativity I find mind blowing. Just browse YouTube for short films, stop-motion animation or home-spun music videos. Search Blogger for beautiful thoughts and diaries. Flickr for photo magic. MySpace for homemade music heaven. Despite the many dark corners of the internet, I'm still stunned by the outpouring of creative opportunities it provides. I'm glad I still get excited every time I log on, log in, upload and download. Power to the people!

I am who I am

2010-01-10T10:50:00.000Z

A new poem from my class.

Bright Notes

2010-01-10T10:13:00.002Z

Record store, Montreal, 2009

Street art, Brooklyn, NY 2009

Upular

2010-01-10T10:08:00.003Z

In Avalanches or Lemon Jelly style, a remix mashup dj called Pogo from Australia collects audio samples from films and makes ambiant tracks from them. This one, from Pixar's 'UP', is liquid happiness.

Overlaps

2010-01-10T09:25:00.005Z

A simple idea. Match an old photo's location and photograph it in situ. The results are really moving; a realisation of vanished time through an overlapping wakeup call. There are lots more overlaps here on this blog.

These photos reminded me of an internet art project called Sleeveface that snowballed out of Cardiff in 2007. Choose an old 12" LP cover, match yourself up to it and snap away. Again, overlapping simplicity leading to warm fuzzy results.

Touching the Void

2010-01-08T13:43:00.002Z

The film that inspired me to start mountaineering; a powerful and painful documentary about a climbing expedition gone wrong. Frightening but liberating in the sense that the closer you are to death, the more you feel alive, few films have gripped me like this one. Dare you to watch it!

Northern Exposure

2010-01-07T09:02:00.009Z

For two days during the Christmas break, I took myself off to the near-arctic delights of Helsinki, Finland, where -17ºC muffled the city and the frozen Baltic Sea around it, suspended in snow and ice. Real Northern Exposure.

Moments in language

2010-01-03T22:32:00.003Z

"All poems are love poems. Poetry can offer consolation, it can be angry and potent, but all these poems, these moments in language, come from love"

Carol Ann Duffy

Barney O' Clock

2009-12-07T19:05:00.000Z

Nephew adventures, 09

Alight

2009-12-07T19:00:00.001Z

Brick Lane, 09

Fractured frames

2009-12-07T18:50:00.001Z

Boston peelings, 2009

Still Morning

2009-11-21T13:51:00.001Z

By WS Merwin

It appears now that there is only one
age and it knows
nothing of age as the flying birds know
nothing of the air they are flying through
or of the day that bears them up
through themselves
and I am a child before there are words
arms are holding me up in a shadow
voices murmur in the shadow
as I watch one patch of sunlight moving
across the green carpet
in a building
gone long ago and all the voices
silent and each word they said in that time
silent now
while I go on seeing that patch of sunlight.

Fleet Foxes - Quiet Houses

2009-11-20T06:39:00.000Z

Illuminated

2009-11-20T06:11:00.002Z

My winter soundtrack; a musical mulled wine to shine some light into these darkening days. The Fleet Foxes' self-titled first album mixes tight Beach Boy-esque harmonies with the 16th Century sacred choral music sound of Thomas Tallis. Like a Baroque Neil Young or a pastoral Bob Dylan, The Fleet Foxes infuse their folk with something gloriously pesantry. The album cover by Bruegel adds even more cinnamon and cloves to the pan, wrapping its glow around the listener like a wood-burning stove. Hunker down and feast on the Foxes.

Flocking

2009-11-14T12:28:00.002Z

Self-portrait outside The Old Sweet Shop, Southfields, November 2009

Poem in October

2009-10-25T08:59:00.003Z

For my 30th Birthday, let Dylan Thomas do the honours...

It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.

My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.

A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill's shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.

Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.

It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels

And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singingbirds.

And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart's truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year's turning.

Alive

2009-10-13T20:03:00.002+01:00

Still tingling from watching the world's greatest free-climber, Frenchman Alain Robert, in a documentary on Channel 4 this week. Scaling the highest structures in the world with bare hands is to take risks of ultimate proportions, but as he made clear in the film, it also gives his life an ultimate intensity. Accepting that each climb could be his last, Robert spends the hours before the attempts in a state of heightened awareness of living, in an appreciation of life. With such a fine line between living and dying, each climb brings a transparency, honesty and beauty to existing. Reckless, selfish, mad? Logically, yes, but universally, no. Totally liberating.

First day of my life

2009-10-08T07:00:00.001+01:00

Snug secret

2009-09-29T21:27:00.006+01:00

Easily my favourite pub in London, The Cat's Back is eccentrically independent, friendly and tucked away near the Thames in Putney. With more random clutter on its walls than a BBC props department, the pub doesn't try to be cool but lets the live music, yummy food and roaring fires do the work. Snug as warm socks; tasty as buttered toast. Go find...

Both Sides Now

2009-09-12T14:46:00.000+01:00

On Putney Bridge

2009-09-12T00:04:00.002+01:00

Peter Doig - Reflection

There are the birds
And there are the trees
And there is the river, flowing
And then there is me.

Home (for Erica)

2009-08-28T13:57:00.005+01:00

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."

T.S Eliot - Little Gidding

Our magnetic migration spins a circle
Back to the honey bright bee hive,
Humming and warm.

A golden paperweight pause
on the worries and distractions
That hide the coordinates
Pointing inwards.

The swallows arrive, and
Lost becomes found.

The Be Good Tanyas

2009-08-28T12:56:00.002+01:00

Find of the summer, this Canadian country/folky/bluegrass female threesome from Vancouver have been chugging along with me across wide skies and Great Lakes. As delicious as warm cake.

Find them here.

The Wild Places

2009-08-28T12:33:00.002+01:00

My rucksack reading as I travelled around Canada this summer, Robert Macfarlane's follow-up to "Mountains of the Mind" is dazzling. As he swims, climbs, hikes and sleeps his way around remote parts of the British Isles to discover if the "wild" still exists here, Macfarlane's focus shifts from the predictable wind-swept, lonely landscapes of the Highlands and the west coast of Ireland to the microcosms of wilderness closer to home, where he finds he can also "remember what the world feels like." The magnetic attraction towards "a bigness outside ourselves" shines from the pages like flashes of sun. There's a huge openness about his prose which was my perfect companion through wild and woolly Canada, yet he is writing about the woods, valleys, moors, summits, ridges, beaches and marshes of the UK. Ian Sinclair describes the book as "a driven and necessary account of the wild places of these islands, near or remote, as they can be located and possessed within ourselves: in good heart, in hungry intelligence."

Sitting on Southerndown beach in South Wales yesterday, making sandcastles with my nephews under stormy skies and white waves, salty and fresh, I thought of this book's message and felt as wild and undaunted as I did in the national parks of Canada. To find the wild within us and around us must be our aim, our true compass bearing. Go read Mr Macfarlane.

Summit Fever

2009-07-25T08:27:00.000+01:00

"Mountains induce, I suppose, modesty within us. Ultimately and most importantly, mountains quicken our sense of wonder."

Robert Macfarlane

Sea Star

2009-07-24T06:27:00.004+01:00

Ah! The Lovely Lisa Hannigan, Ireland's No.1 foxy lady and husky goddess. Oh to be on that beach under the stars with her...

2009-07-23T07:38:00.000+01:00

Kaleidoscopic

2009-07-21T06:04:00.001+01:00

Self portrait, London

"Down to Yasgur's farm"

2009-07-18T23:26:00.003+01:00

Big up Mr Richie Havens with his funk-fuelled strumming and soulful Summer of '69 cries for love. Woodstock wonders.

Love after Love

2009-07-15T20:50:00.002+01:00

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott

Gould plays Bach

2009-07-09T19:50:00.003+01:00

A synthesis of greatness and clarity: Glen Gould playing J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations. Polyphony articulated with love, an arch and flow of transcending form (with some classic Gould harmonising for good measure). Put it in a rocket and send it out into space as my choice for human creative beauty.

Riding high

2009-07-08T20:32:00.006+01:00

"Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing"
Lucille Clifton

My favourite clouds - cirrus clouds. High above a playing field of summer sun, snowflakes fall and stretch as ice tails across the humming blue, riding the current of motion; whispy and wondrous.

Unwittingly

2009-07-06T21:25:00.002+01:00

Self portrait, 6.07.09

I've visited the place
where thought begins:
pear trees suspended in sunlight, narrow shops,
alleys to nothing

though someone else again would recognise
the warm barn, the smell of milk,
the wintered cattle
shifting in the dark,

it's always the same lit space,
the one good measure:
Sometimes you'll wake in a chair
as the light is fading,

or stop on the way to work
as a current of starlings
turns on itself
and settles above the green,

and because what we learn in the dark
remains all our lives,
a noise like the sea, displacing the day's
pale knowledge,

you'll come to yourself
in a glimmer of rainfall or frost,
the burnt smell of autumn,
a meeting of parallel lines,

and know you were someone else
for the longest time,
pretending you knew where you were, like a diffident tourist,
lost on the one main square, and afraid to enquire.

John Burnside

Peeping pillarbox

2009-07-06T21:09:00.002+01:00

Southfields, 5.07.09

Unbearable lightness

2009-07-06T20:40:00.003+01:00

"Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect some day to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves."

I've read and reread Kundera's Czech classic with affection and a disturbing sense of familiarity. Tomas, the main protagonist, is torn between the desire to chase women and fall in love; insignificance versus significance, meninglessness versus meaning, lightness versus weight. If each of our lives just occurs once, with nothing beyond, then logically no single decision matters. Since decisions do not matter, they are light - they don't cause suffering. Yet this insignificance causes us suffering - weight. The search for true meaning in a world of fleeting pleasures confuses Tomas like it confuses me.

Crush

2009-06-27T22:04:00.002+01:00

Austrian artist Willi Dorner squeezes primary coloured humans into nooks and crannies for his Bodies in Urban Spaces project. Cosy crushing.

Sea Tongue

2009-06-27T21:51:00.004+01:00

Sea Tongue, by a child in my class

Encounters at the End of the World

2009-06-04T19:14:00.003+01:00

Avoiding making another film about fluffy penguins, director Werner Herzog's frozen meditative montage of stories from the South Pole is a documentary film with heart. The rumbling Russian Orthodox choir as a soundtrack to the landscape adds to the mystical musings of Herzog's essential questions. Go see.

Postscript

2009-05-12T16:55:00.002+01:00

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

Seamus Heaney

Lemon happiness

2009-05-12T16:38:00.000+01:00

Mr Scruff - Music Takes Me Up

Woodsmoke

2009-05-10T13:46:00.004+01:00

Who hath smelt woodsmoke at twilight? Who hath heard the birch log burning? Who is quick to read the noises of the night? Let him follow with the others. For the young men's feet are turning, To the camps of proved desire and known delight.

Rudyard Kipling

Distances

2009-04-07T18:42:00.002+01:00

Swifts turn in the heights of the air;
higher still turn the invisible stars.
When day withdraws to the ends of the earth
their fires shine on a dark expanse of sand.

We live in a world of motion and distance.
The heart flies from tree to bird,
from bird to distant star,
from star to love; and love grows
in the quiet house, turning and working,
servant of thought, a lamp held in one hand.

Philippe Jaccottet

Gone Away

2009-03-28T22:39:00.001Z

Banksy's "Space Girl & Bird" and "Girl with Balloon," with the late John Martyn's "Early Hours."

Shifting Shadows

2009-03-17T07:13:00.001Z

Drunk on light

2009-03-17T06:58:00.003Z

Oxford Spring - 15.3.09

Squinting, to absorb the feeling
Like coming up for air
Gasping, to inhale
The brilliant blue.

In praise of Oliver Postgate

2008-12-13T12:58:00.002Z

"Here was a man capable of effortlessly breathing gallons of soul into even the most basic of artificial lifeforms. A saggy old cloth cat. A steam engine made of paper, puffing cotton wool balls for steam. A tribe of miniature pink aliens on the moon. Together, the team of Postgate and Peter Firmin were apparently incapable of creating anything less than timelessly wonderful whenever they sat down to work. Each was infused with a uniquely British sense of genteel eccentricity; they became a key element in countless individual childhoods, informing the dreams and imaginations of millions of people. All of it forged in a former cowshed in Kent, sewn into being like an enchanted tapestry made of 16mm film. The stories were simple, the animation basic, the puppets and drawings polite yet charismatic, but together they were far more than the sum of their parts. Close your eyes and picture them and you can't help but feel genuine warmth; these films were made with love."

Charlie Brooker's tribute to the late Oliver Postgate, childrens' animator.

Snow on snow

2008-12-07T19:29:00.002Z

Drawn using only pencil crayons, Raymond Briggs' crosshatched masterpiece - The Snowman - is known to millions. It was this opening sequence that held me in awe as a child as we watched the animation religiously every Christmas, packed into the primary school music room with other excited classes of children. The dark wood, the shot of Briggs walking away from the camera, the change from film to drawing, and the aerial shots of snowbound fields...all utterly ethereal.

Debut

2008-11-30T22:07:00.004Z

Is there a more beautiful album cover? My 13 year old heart melted when I got this, the album that I would tape for my first girlfriend and wish that she had those eyes, that jumper, that winter glow. My heart's debut.

2008-11-10T19:33:00.002Z

The rain has brought the night,
and the night has brought the rain.

Crazy in the Coconut

2008-10-26T18:18:00.002Z

Respect for the masters of mash-up! I've been mashing potatoes to this tune on replay for an hour now. Does it get any better?! Come back Avalanches, let's mash together...

2008-10-26T08:42:00.001Z

For we, which now behold these present days,
Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.

Shakespeare - Sonnet 106

Tessellation

2008-10-26T08:25:00.002Z

Tell me that I'm not alone in my tessellation admiration! The humble floor or wall tile is transformed into a miniature canvas of loveliness when pattern and decoration are added, from the Portuguese and Spanish exterior displays to the hidden delights of Islamic interiors.

Earth. Fire. Bake. Glaze. Stone. Sand. Mosaic. Symmetry. Dazzle. Geometry in flames.

Indian Summer

2008-10-12T19:47:00.005+01:00

Wimbledon Common, Oct 08, Mr Tom

A gift. Utterly unasked for. Crisp October sunshine and blue skies. Walking on Wimbledon Common today was my fleeting, delicious Indian Summer, whose ashes will become winter.

Clear moments are so short.
There is much more darkness. More
ocean than firm land. More
shadow than form.
Adam Zagajewski

Awareness

2008-10-07T20:03:00.004+01:00

"There are all kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able to truly care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the 'rat race' - the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about simple awareness - awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: 'This is water, this is water.'"

Taken from a speech by the American writer David Foster Wallace who died last month.

I am who I am because of everyone

2008-10-07T19:55:00.002+01:00

My class wrote their own "I am" poems inspired by the Orange adverts. Here is a class version using lines selected by all the children.

Nizlopi

2008-09-28T10:03:00.003+01:00

Mr Tom has a sad heart having heard that one of his favourite bands is most likely splitting up. Nizlopi (Luke Concannon & John Parker) have been doing their own thing from the start: powered by only double bass, acoustic guitar and John's beat-boxing, their sound blends folksy hip-hop with jazzy indie, throwing in some reggae for good measure. The lads momentarily made it into the headlights with their number 1 song "JCB" in 2005, but have otherwise spun out quiet masterpieces from their family record label under the general radar. The October tour they are about to embark on is rumoured to be their last, which is sad sad news seeing as though it is playing live when they stand out from anything else around. Moral of this post: catch them on this (final) tour, support them by downloading their stuff and spread the Nizlopi word...

The Gentle Good

2008-09-06T19:14:00.003+01:00

At the Green Man Festival 2007

The debut EP

Last year I mentioned The Gentle Good in a post on a folk festival I had been to. Because I can't believe that this Cardiff-based secret has not escaped into the big old world yet, I thought it was high time to blog about him again. Gareth Bonello is a folkey dokey ragtime guitarist spinning sweet sweet music in English, Welsh and Spanish. He himself describes his sound as "plinkey plonkey," but to that you've got to add warm, melancholic, understated, rootsy and lullaby lovely. Throw in some mighty fine banjo playing on top and you've got The Gentle Good. Make it an Autumn resolution to listen to this man daily; order the EP online or listen to tracks here on his Myspace.

I got in touch with Mr Gentle Good to ask him a hodge-podge of random questions. Here are his lucid responses. Cheers Gareth!

Musical Influences?

Started with Bob Dylan, then onwards to Martin Carthy, Julie Murphy & Dylan Fowler, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Nick Drake, Richard James, Bonnie Prince Billy, John Fahey, Earl Scruggs, Dave Evans and Joanna Newsom. You also have to mix in a bit of Super Furries, Gorky's, Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock for good measure.

Best thing about Cardiff?
the tropical climate and friendly locals.

Favourite chord?

I don't have a favorite chord as it wouldn't work without other chords either side. I am secretly partial to an Aminor something or other though, but don't tell the others.

Which animal would you be?
A gibbon - all that swinging in the trees.

Favourite pudding?
Apple crumble with custard.

Mornings or evenings?

Evenings - I used to be a morning person but not any more. the problem is if I have an enjoyable evening then the following morning isn't up to much. It's a hard cycle to break once you've started.

Beat Control

2008-09-06T18:19:00.001+01:00

A class in Taiwan made their own music video to the happy song "Beat Control" by Tilly and the Wall. It's hard not to smile for a long time after watching it!

Wellieness

2008-08-29T17:39:00.006+01:00

If I fancy a girl I'll usually try to work out whether she owns a pair of wellies. Why? Because wellies stand for so much of what I love in life: muddy, squelchy, soggy rambles, the happiness of walking in fields or leaves and getting dirty, autumnal adventures or festival frolics - the folkey dokey spirit. Give it some welly!

The Book of Idle Pleasures

2008-08-28T15:27:00.006+01:00

Mr Tom Hodgkinson, founder of The Idler magazine with friend and famous cloud-spotter Gavin Pretor-Pinney, strikes again with a "compendium of simple delights." The book lists and reflects on a hundred simple things as proof that the best things in life really are free. I was happy to see that many of the entries were about topics that have appeared on this blog; a justification that praising the lovely in great and small things isn't a strange thing to do. Below I've listed my favourite pleasures from the book, but I'd recommend you to choose your own or add to the list.

* poking the fire
* sitting on a balcony ("one foot in the world, one foot out")
* waiting for the tea to brew
* tree houses
* taking a nap
* squishing bread
* sleeping outside
* conkers
* merry-making
* leaning on gates
* morning sex
* good company
* choosing to get wet in the rain
* folding paper
* walking back home drunk
* the beach ("always enough pebbles to go round")

Into the Wild

2008-08-27T13:17:00.006+01:00

"I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in."
John Muir

Mountaineer Jon Krakauer, author of Into Thin Air (an tingling account of his troubled Everest climb), pieced together the biography and adventures of one Christopher McCandless, wilderness wanderer and searcher. Into the Wild retraces McCandless' two year trip to Alaska and his ultimate death in an abandoned bus on a trail near Denali National Park. Accused by many of naivity, recklessness and even selfishness, McCandless and his longing to return to nature rekindled the debate about wilderness and society. From Thoreau and Muir to Krakauer, I side with seeing his adventure as largely noble and uplifting. From the fear of a life unlived, McCandless stepped out of comfort and into the real, the raw. The times in my life when I have felt most alive have come from when I have been closest to death: in a white-out blizzard on the Cairngorms, shivering and aching on Mont Blanc, drenched and lost in Snowdonia. I am not celebrating suicidal unthinking, but the acceptance that adventure without risk is impossible.

I've got to big up the soundtrack to the 2007 movie as well - Eddie Vedder's folksty, rootsy mandolin stumming is outstanding, but the real prize is hearing his ragged and raged voice again, arching over the wilderness like a blazing sunset. Like McCandless' story, the sound of Vedder makes you look out of the window and think about packing your things...

Orkney / This Life

2008-08-17T18:17:00.002+01:00

It is big sky and its changes,
the sea all round and the waters within.
It is the way sea and sky
work off each other constantly,
like people meeting in Alfred Street,
each face coming away with a hint
of the other's face pressed in it.
It is the way a week-long gale
ends and folk emerge to hear
a single bird cry way high up.

It is the way you lean to me
and the way I lean to you, as if
we are each other's prevailing;
how we connect along our shores,
the way we are tidal islands
joined for hours then inaccessible,
I'll go for that, and smile when I
pick sand off myself in the shower.
The way I am an inland loch to you
when a clatter of white whoops and rises...

It is the way Scotland looks to the South,
the way we enter friends' houses
to leave what we came with, or flick
the kettle's switch and wait.
This is where I want to live,
close to where the heart gives out,
ruined, perfected, an empty arch against the sky
where birds fly through instead of prayers
while in Hoy Sound the ferry's engines thrum
this life this life this life

Andrew Greig

2008-08-15T14:59:00.001+01:00

Sugar-coated, I know, but it makes me smile...

Stick it!

2008-08-15T12:39:00.002+01:00

Rumour has it that Mr Tom has been up to his crafy stickering again about town. Could this be one of his? Mr Tom has declined to make any comment.

2008-08-15T11:09:00.002+01:00

Found on the Postsecret blog

Moments

2008-08-13T12:45:00.004+01:00

6697 Polaroid photographs spanning 18 years of a man's life. One photo for every day; self-portraits, objects, places, occasions, friends, fuzziness. A commitment and compulsiveness that is a window into his life and, ultimately, his death from a brain tumour in 1997. Put online by his friends Hugh Crawford and Betsy Reid, the collection documents the days of Jamie Livingston, a New York-based film maker, musician and street performer. In a letter to the Polaroid company describing his project in 1986, Jamie summed up the thinking behind it:

"What's important is that [each photo] represents an instant in that day which I remember forever onward. With some photos I can relive entire days just from a glance. Others bring back only the moment."

This beautifully sad collection, which glows in the dark, can be found in full here. Vital viewing.

Monkey business

2008-08-08T13:09:00.003+01:00

A lovely little book by Miss Keri Smith, all about "making our physical world more meaningful," she says, in an urban gallery kind of way. Stenciling, chalking, guerilla gardening (including seed bombing - such a great idea) and stickering are all covered, along with doodley hand illustrations. Visit her equally lovely blog here.

Heist of height

2008-08-07T19:20:00.003+01:00

I've just returned from seeing the sublime new documentary film, Man on Wire, about the wire-walker Philippe Petit and his crossing between the World Trade Centre towers in 1974. "A criminal conspiracy with the object of doing something beautiful" is how director James Marsh describes the 45 minute aerial performance of Petit (stressing it was not a stunt). There's little to say except go and see it, this outstanding documentary that celebrates a denial of death by a man fully alive.

Scruff action

2008-08-06T18:55:00.001+01:00

Mr Scruff's animations for his "Honeydew" track on Ninja Tune records

Doodle do

2008-08-06T15:19:00.011+01:00

Aside from being a fantastic word, doodles are one of my favourite types of art. Fast, free and daydreamy, they contain so much of what is often missing in "serious" art. The pen-and-ink drawings of Quentin Blake were my door into the doodle world as a child; scribbly strokes of genius that were the perfect companion to Roald Dahl's words. Everyone doodled in on their books in school, but somehow we seem to doodle less as we grow up. However, I've noticed a trend in recent graphic design to use the doodle style as a break from slick, computerised fonts and images. Big up the return of the friendly, happy doodle! The wonderful dj Mr Scruff has championed the doodle in his videos and artwork, and a search of the internet brings up lots of artists doing similarly lovely things with their pens. Have a click at some of the links below to inspire you to return to the daydreaming:

A brilliant doodle-dedicated blog

Homepage of the doodling dj Mr Scruff

Doodles of the lovely David Setter

Home of the mighty Quentin Blake

Uncle Tom's Cabin

2008-07-18T18:12:00.004+01:00

Reconstructed interior of Dylan Thomas' shed at Laugharne

"Suddenly she caught sight of something glittering between the pine trunks. It must be a little lake. Over on the other side she could see a red-painted cabin in a small clearing surrounded by silver birches. A faint wisp of smoke was rising from the chimney."
Extract from Sophie's World, by Jostein Gaarder

Dylan Thomas, Roald Dahl, Virginia Woolf, Mark Twain, Henry D. Thoreau, Edvard Grieg, Gustav Mahler...the connection? Owners of writing or composing sheds and huts - hives of quiet creativity where the mind can settle and unfold. "A room of one's own," Woolf would call it, a place to "live deliberately," wrote Thoreau. I have always been fascinated by these microcosms of shelter, warmth and peace. Over ten years ago I picked up a book lying on a table in a Snowdonian backpackers entitled "Cabin Fever - Sheds & Shelters, Huts & Hideaways," by Marie-France Boyer. My shedonistic desires were confirmed. Back-to-basics, humble, stripped of complications and distractions, a cabin is an adult's treehouse where a personal world can be entered. It transports us into the magical realms of fairytales - to the Three Little Pigs, Hansel and Gretel, and the dark forests of the brothers Grimm. My favourite sheds and shelters are to be found in Scandinavia, like the one in the extract from Gaarder's "Sophie's World." Or the wooden hermitages hidden in the thick forests of the Athos peninsula in Greece. Glimpsing them through the trees reaffirms the desire to escape into their snug interiors, to sit around the wood-burning stove and dry my socks. For fellow lovers of these poetic places of small dimensions, visit We Love Sheds to be inspired to retreat.

Conversing

2008-07-16T16:19:00.002+01:00

Converse Love

I've just bought myself a new pair of Mr Chuck Taylor's Converse All-Stars, and I'm basking in their beauty. A hundred years of simplicity and style, adopted and adapted by many but still basically the same. I got my first pair when I was thirteen (olive green chucks - dearly missed) and have kept on singing their subculture signature tune. Mr Converse, we salute you!

Spontaneous scribbles

2008-06-11T23:07:00.002+01:00

One of my favourite bits of being a Primary teacher is receiving art from the children in my class, undertaken and given spontaneously in a moment of smiles and simplicity. Unrestrained and golden. It's impossible to be unhappy when you get pictures like this.

2008-05-25T11:41:00.002+01:00

It is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, which, by often rumination, wraps me in a most humorous sadness.

Shakespeare, As You Like It

Petr Horacek

2008-05-12T16:31:00.004+01:00

A Czech author and illustrator, Petr Horacek's work has similarities to Eric Carle in his layering of colourful hand-painted images. Click here to explore more of his beautiful work.

Banksy in the classroom

2008-05-08T19:27:00.006+01:00

One of the beauties of Primary school teaching is being able to trial ideas and experiment with the curriculum to catch the children's enthusiasm. Ok, and to do stuff that the teacher enjoys. After my Banksy-related posts on here, I showed my class images of his work and they asked to take it further by trying some stencil wall art themselves. Amazingly, the Head teacher gave us a wall in school as our blank canvas, and the children have spent the last four weeks designing, cutting, sticking and spraying their stencil images. Banksy would be proud.

Self-portrait

2008-05-08T19:05:00.000+01:00

Mr Tom, May 2008

Roaring Dark

2008-05-01T16:19:00.002+01:00

The wind...trailing with it the frosty scent of forests and the cold intoxication of the sea. In a million holes and corners it refreshed a man like a flagon, and astonished him like a blow. Blew out a candle by which a boy read Treasure Island, and wrapped him in the roaring dark. But everywhere it bore drama into undramatic lives.

GK Chesterton

Imponderable

2008-04-27T11:22:00.003+01:00

The children are gone. The holiday is over.
Outside it is Fall. Inside it is so
quiet that the silence seems inclined to
talk to itself. They will not recover
the summer of seventy-seven again, even
though they become, in turn, their own children.

I sit in my sixty odd years and wonder
how often before in this old house a man has
sat thinking of what is now, and what was.
But can it serve a serious purpose to ponder
upon the imponderable? There, there beyond a
fall glimmers the long-lost garden

That garden where we, too, as in a spell
stared eye into dazed eye and did not see
that suddenly the holy day was over,
the flashing lifeguard, the worm in the tree,
the glittering of the bright sword as it fell,
and the gate closing for all time to be.

George Barker

Fuzziness

2008-04-26T18:55:00.004+01:00

These beautiful images are by the Scottish painter Peter Doig. An article in the Guardian a few months ago by Adrian Searle described his work as "introspective...a world on the verge of disintegration." Doig's paintings are made up of multiple layers, an agglomeration of touches with their blips and fuzziness. Drifiting boats and canoes, "a faded and indeterminate irridescence, a sort of receding memory of place and colour." When he was young, Doig moved with his family to Trinidad, and later to Canada. This geography is often reflected in his work: trees and reflections, the swamp, water and ice, veiled sunlight and falling snow, brushwood and mangrove. Often based on photographs, his paintings convey a sense of stillness in a moving world, a dreaminess that is fully real but indefinable.

Yesterday Girl

2008-04-13T15:01:00.002+01:00

I remember her face (I think)
and a summer evening
standing on the shore
watching the Mersey
turning in its sleep
and the seagulls crying
sliding down the sky
like kids on banisters
while we wrote
I love you
in the sweaty summer sand
with sticks
and skipped across rocks
and both held hands
to keep from falling
out of love

But we couldn't

Richard Hill

Faded

2008-04-12T15:15:00.005+01:00

Faded shop advertising, Triana, Las Palmas 2008

In praise of Laura Barton

2008-04-03T18:50:00.003+01:00

Guardian and Observer readers will feel a happy chime in their hearts when they read the name of Laura Barton, a feature writer who often pops up in 'Film & Music' on a Friday. Unceasingly a revealer of the lovely, her articles stand out for their unmistakable grasp of what matters. Here are two extracts from recent articles that have made me smile lots:

Trusting the darkness (30.11.07)
"There is something lawless and liberating about listening to music in the dark. It swells the sound, of course, frees the listener of visual distractions while taking away the walls and the structures and leaving a sort of wilderness."

Hail, hail, rock 'n' roll (28.3.07)
It was the middle of a heatwave, and so, even at night, you could sit bare-legged on the porch-stoop eating peaches and honey and sipping wine. And we sat there a long while, talking and drinking and listening to the music of the street - to the shouts in the night and the chatter of the bugs and the bursts of distant car radios and, from somewhere up above, the sound of Django Reinhardt playing I'll See You in My Dreams. That evening in July seemed to me a time of perfect, ripened happiness. And whenever I think of it now, it seems wound up in the song I was playing a lot, and that drifted out of the open window and up into the warm Oregon air: Andrew Bird's Yawny at the Apocalypse...They are rare, those songs that conjure that bird-like ascending happiness, that feeling of winging wildly across the white...It offers not a giddy, tumbling happiness, but that glorious feeling that rises up after rain, a serene kind of happiness that is also somehow in possession of a peculiar near-sadness

Temporal Truths

2008-04-01T18:24:00.004+01:00

Following on from the "hopeful street art" post, it would be wrong not to blog about Banksy, the enigmatic English graffiti artist. Despite building a reputation out of rather darkly anarchistic, politically provocative street art, there is another side to Banksy's works that I love. In so many of the stencilled images there is warmth, fantastic humour and humanism. It's also the way that you have to hunt for his work across London and beyond that's compelling, as locations are so random and temporal. Shying away from revealing who he really is, the 'mystery of Banksy' adds to the codebreaking aspect of finding and enjoying his work. Click here to see many more of Banksy's works, with directions and status updates. Happy hunting!

Geese over Wandsworth

2008-03-29T17:23:00.004Z

High above stop signs and street grumblings
They go, in clear formation. Honking.
Forwards and focussed,
Workmen in the road stop their drilling,
Necks raised skywards.
A window cleaner gazes beyond
The top rung of his ladder,
As the arrow in flight points towards
Meaning.

Mr Tom

Stay with you - Lemon Jelly

2008-03-29T17:20:00.000Z

Blue Field

2008-03-02T16:38:00.003Z

A flood as the day releases
and the whole snow world
is neither wet nor deep, but primary.
Colour so inherent, it does not fall
but rises from my skin,
the snow, the trees, the road.
This blue isn't built or grown.
It has no tissue, nothing
to touch or taste or bring to mind
a memory, no iris or artery,
no gentian, aconite or anemone,
no slate, plum, oil-spill or gun,
no titanium or turquoise,
no mercury or magnesium,
no phosphorus , sapphire or silver foil,
no duck egg or milk jug,
no chambray, denim or navy,
no indigo, octopus ink, no ink,
no element. The blue moment,
sininen hetki in a language that claims
no relation but greets in passing
picture blue, cyan. Ultraviolet
twilight, higher than the heaven
of swimming or flying - no splash.
A time without clouded objects,
in which you might become the glass
you swallowed through cold.
Light draws back
behind the rim of the eye as it closes.
I keep my distance, as things turn blue
through stillness and distance,
as everything blue is distant.

Lavinia Greenlaw

Fleeting

2008-03-02T16:10:00.003Z

Anonymous postcard sent to Postsecret