Kings of England

Good News!

I have been talking with my Dad about starting a company in which both he and I are principle devisers and performers. As of yesterday, we are agreed. And as of today, we have named ourselves...

"Kings of England".

We are currently writing up a pitch for some cash but in the meantime, we are modestly underway. A conversation we had a couple of weeks ago as I was researching 'Recent Falls', prompted him to quote me the following, from Alan Bennett's 'Writing Home':

...the dull distorting effects of time, in phrases which sound right but aren’t…He said: Oh, I don’t know, I don’t remember, then he says: one always forgets the most important things, it’s the things one can’t remember that stay with you (Bennett, 1998, p258)

Which, essentially, is what our first work will be about - the fictions that will have to stand in for fact, in the event of forgetting.

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By way of an early research task, I asked Dad to list his Top 5 songs, as something we might work with (see below, right click, or whatever, to get it up big & legible).

'Recent Falls' at Volume.

Last night (Friday, 20th June), performed 'Recent Falls' a 12-minute lecture, followed by a five-minute performance, before an audience of, perhaps, forty people at 'Volume' the quarterly night run by Sometimes... and friends. Also on the bill was Rachel Nelson & A Middle Sex, Joanna Brown, and Claire Blundell Jones.

'Recent Falls' was a continuation of the work I am making concerning a stranger, my father, before he was my father.

Extracts from 'Recent Falls':

Article 4


In the picture he’s about 23, five years my junior. He has jumped from a cliff into the sea, and I tend to suppose that the picture documents the precise moment when a jump turns into a fall. Little is known, since little is remembered. From the picture we cannot know that this was in France, somewhere near St. Tropez, that the year is 1958 or that the photographer was named either Wilf, or Joe (probably Joe). And we cannot know how steep the drop would be, nor can we know he survived it.
He is not yet my father. He has not yet married my mother. (This is even earlier – if we still abide by earlies and lates), he has not yet married a first time and has not yet begotten an eldest son or an only daughter.
Not yet my father, and in this respect, a stranger to me.
I remember asking: Who is the man in the photograph?

Article 5
Sometime in late infancy or early childhood he asked his Father: “what time is it”? He had already learnt something of time, but did not yet know how to tell it.

At length the Father replied –

“Sometimes, I’d like to write a book,
A book all about time
About how it doesn’t exist,
How the past and the future
Are one continuous present.
I think that all people – those living
Those who have lived
And those who are still to live – are alive now.
I should like to take that subject to pieces
Like a soldier dismantling his rifle” (Yevgeny Vinukurov, Cited in John Berger's 'and our faces, my heart, brief as photos', 1984, p21).

“Time is a timeless concept and has led mankind badly astray, especially as we record age, which we do from the time of birth, and yet (...) it is not elapsed time that really concerns us, but time remaining – and that is something we cannot know. A youth of fifteen who will die tomorrow is older by far than an elder of seventy-three who has ten years remaining to him. So we should not concern ourselves with time, except as we must arrange meetings or journeys by public convenience”.
And then he looked at his watch, and gave his son the time" (adapted from Garrison Keillor, Wobegone Boy, 1996, p253).

Article 9 (Coda):
Before he jumped the man turned to his friend and said: “There is not one atom in this body that has not been forged in the furnace of the sun. Here I stand – I cannot do differently. God help me. Amen!”
On the way down, he was heard to yell: "So far, so good, so far, so good, so far, so good…” the litany stopping short on its thirteenth repeat, with the announcement of a loud splashing sound, which itself stopped abruptly, with the announcement of a deep silence that seemed to be matched only by the stillness of the air.




top-to-bottom:
Just before the lights went down
Projection of Yves Klein, "Saut Dans le Vide"
Me in my father's vintage swimwear,just before I jumped
(Note: these are not the actual trunks in the 1958 photo,
by all accounts they perished in 1962).

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Further to this - some lovely surprises. Joanna Brown and I have been writing back and forth to each other - sporadically - since we met at the Goat Island Symposium at the end of February, beginning of March. She incorporated one of my texts into her show and, if truth be told, my Rules and Regs show, 'First Classic of the Season' and 'Recent Falls', were both responses to an work I had not yet seen, her 'We Will Mend on the Highways'.
In response to this experience of not-knowing Jo or her work generally, or her show specifically, I wrote a text, which she adapted slightly:

"1. Photograph

I learnt the name of the show, and found one photograph, in which I observe the following details: your hand pressed flat to floor; elbow pointing upwards; head up (eyes looking slightly to the left), and I notice the reflection of your hand in the floor.

It is 10.09 on the 27th March, and for me, for now, the performance is a short distance, enfolded, between the fingertips and the nape of the neck. If I look again at the photograph I cannot be sure what movement led into this stillness, or what movement led out of it.

When I tried this stillness for myself I held it a while, long enough to notice how I was moving, trembling under my own weight, tense at the top of my spine. When I got up I felt sure that the performance began and ended in the humming feeling that joined up my wrist and the top of my spine. I held this position for 23 minutes. 23 to think this thought through.

Look at me I'm dancing".

Rules & Regs Process

Wow -
Rules and Regs O.V.E.R. (for myself, Christine, Neil, Simone, Eleni and Bethanie at least) so: Big Thanks to Seth at R&R and Matt, the legendary Alice Booth, Julia, Simon, Dom, Steph and Dave at the Nuffield Theatre for their help, support and general good spiritedness.
Rather than do lots of little blogs (t-h-r-o-w-i-n-g... got a bit neglected in the month of April). I thought I'd try and re-create the structure of the final showings 25th-26th April, together with a few images, where appropriate.

Here is a picture from Friday's Rehearsal. The cones-in-the-ears bit didn't make it into the show, but anyway:


Photos: Kristian Wilding.

FULL TEXT FINAL DRAFT:

Bowes (&Son): First Classic of the Season –

/ The Audience walk in - I am playing a small accordion.

I found this Accordion at my Landlady Jean’s house. She said I could borrow it.
The story went that when she was growing up her oldest brother Peter worked at the Docks in Liverpool, and he had a friend, Franz, from Germany, a sailor, who stayed with the family whenever his ship came in.
Once when Franz was staying he brought out his little Accordion for Jean to play. Her curiosity about the instrument sparked something in him and he decided to make her a present of it.
Now when I play it, I think about the unfamiliarity of the instrument, how it hurts hand to hold it and, despite how light it is, how heavy it feels.
I think about Franz sailing wherever he sailed, and I wondered what he did without the Accordion, and then I think about him listening to all the music that Jean was playing, hearing the notes, the melodies, not even imagining them, but actually hearing them, far beyond the Northern Sea.

/ Introduction:

And now: Good evening / afternoon, and welcome to today’s lecture; which concerns, for the most part, the passing of time. We were rabbits and dogs, the passing time; we were kestrels and starlings, the passing of time, let’s drink to that, the passing of time.

/ Motherhood, Boyhood, and the book of the birds -

In the year of my birth my mother kept a book detailing the following weights: March the 25th: 2 lbs 6 ounces / April the 25th/26th: 2 lbs, 14 ounces / May the 15th: 3lbs 5 1/2 ounces, along with the details of her encounters with bird life, plant life and other phenomena of the Natural World. After twenty blank pages, the book recommences on the 7th August 1990. Now we are ten:

“Out walking. Today we spotted a kestrel circling below us, but steadily gaining height. We followed the path towards the river and a little while later were stopped in our tracks by a bird suddenly falling, like a stone from the sky. Was this the same bird that had flown below us just half an hour before? Speechless – yes – amazing, it was so stunned that I was able to walk right up to it, and slowly fold my jumper over its back, and wrap it up. It was so scared that its beak was wide open, but no sound came. We decided to take her home. Something or someone might find it, and…goodness knows what would happen then.
When we arrived at the Owl Centre they told us that kestrel had a sprained wing; that had we of left her, she would surely have died. They let us take the kestrel home to nurse her. And we have decided to call her Princess.”

Sunday August the 23rd:

“A lovely sunny morning quite calm and still with a little mist lingering around the hills. We carried the box across the bridge at the foot of the mountain and Simon pulled the string to open the door of the hutch. She stayed in the cage a few minutes, and then, suddenly, suddenly, flew straight out of the box. As we walked back across the bridge and down the road, she crossed over ahead of us and wheeled back towards the hills. As she flew, Simon started singing a little song

Little Birdie, Little Birdie / Give to me your song / I'm a short time for to stay here / And a long time when I'm gone / I’d rather be in some dark hollow / where the sun refuse to shine / than to see some other man love you / when I want to call you mine / Little Birdie, Little Birdie / What makes you fly so high / It's because I've a true heart / That I don't care when I’ll die"

/ Promenade –

In the picture he is about eighteen, ten years my junior, looking smart, handsome, walking down the promenade with his father, who looks at the camera, with some kind of annoyance, discomfort, or sadness. That was Bridlington, though / Brid / and that was my father, not me.

He said “The Sea Hugs and will not let go” [FN1], but that was Carl Sandburg, not me. He had three questions, and he kept on asking them: “Who am I / Where am I going / Where have I been”. He had to keep on asking because the answers kept changing. Carl Sandburg is sometimes a book, sometimes a song, sometimes a train ride and sometimes a thought of the sea.

/ Dawn’s Early –

We stayed the night in a hotel, drinking ourselves to a troubled sleep. The following morning we were out at first light. I looked out for you, between an early sunrise and a last morning star. Far away were the twinkling night-lights of Vreedenburg and sleepy villages on the coast below.
There were five white dice, and I couldn't even throw a six. Looking down, I saw that each of the dots was a full stop that comes at the end of a name. Peter Bos. Ronnie Krepel. Hayo den Boest. Frank van den Bos. Car Gout.
They are standing by a memorial to the fisherman of Scheveningen, 1914-1919, which bears the legend: "There they are, where there is neither night nor mist")

Heart-Heart-Binoculars-Heart-Heart-Binoculars-Heart-Heart-Binoculars.

/ Interview –

He said: "A man and his son are stood on places and spots which don’t exist anymore". That was Drederich Diedrichsen, in a review of a record called Roots and Locations by Car Gout’s band, Trespassers W [FN2]. I found the record in Oxfam whilst making this show. When I decided to buy the record I also decided not to listen to it until afterwards, but reading the liner notes I learned that it was a concept album about a man and his son spending time together a city, The Hague. Immediately, I presumed the father to be my father’s father, William, Bill, and the son to be my father, Our Sam, Peter, Dad.

/ I Was at School -

My first performance was twenty two years ago, hiding under bird-hat made from red baseball cap with the letters B-M-X, yellow beak from an old Weetabix box, brown cloth for feathers. I had to ask them, each of them:

Where was is that we were together? / Who were you that I lived with, walked with? / The brother, the sister, the friend? / If I never meet you in this life, let me feel the lack / One glance from your eyes / and my life would be yours [FN3]

/ Lecture on Carl Sandburg –

Part 1. Minutes, Seconds, and the Times of our Lives: Carl Sandburg considered himself a fine orator and like all fine orators, had opinions on everything and could not be made to shut up.

He would jump to his feet, grab his lapels, and make a speech, even if they had only asked for the time of day. He would say, ‘Time is a timeless concept and has led mankind badly astray, especially as we record age, which we do from the time of birth, and yet (...) it is not elapsed time that really concerns us, but time remaining, and that is something we cannot know. A youth of fifteen who will die tomorrow is older by far than an elder of seventy-three who has ten years remaining to him. So we should not concern ourselves with time, except as we must arrange meetings or journeys by public convenience.’ And then he would look at the watch and give them the time [FN4]

Part 2. The Landlocked Mountaintop and the Salt-Salt Sea: Carl Sandburg was “born” in Galesburg Ohio, on the 6th of January 1878, and “died” in Flat Rock, North Carolina, 22nd July 1967.
Both of these settlements were, and remain landlocked, but home, between 1945 and 1967, was a large estate named Connemara, where he lived with a wife and daughters.
At Connemara, Carl Sandburg had an entire Mountaintop to roam, and enough solitude to write. Connemara is derived from the Gaelic Con Mhac: of the sea.
Carl Sandburg fished but was never a fisherman, he sailed, but was never a sailor. So I think that his seas, like ours, were surely imagined.

Part 3. Silence

(...)

Carl Sandburg, I have something to say to you: ‘Wäschezettel’, an ordinary word in a language neither of us can speak. It is a word that was found by some children, playing in an abandoned building in the Netherlands after the Second World War. It is a word found after the danger had passed (Kerchief drop).

/ I Pictured a Story –

MY FATHER Walks Onstage Behind Me, I say:

He's coming into focus / notices his unsteady feet on foreign soil / While my father is still in Bridlington I am in Vreedenburg, I am in Scheveningen, I have been standing there for years on end, whilst his sun was set, done for going, going gone.

PHOTOGRAPHER photographs us in the pose from the Bridlington photo.

DAD peels off from me, and walks across the sea to the dance floor.

/ Last Chance for a slow dance –

I put on THE MUSIC: Memories of You, by Benny Goodman. Dances slowly.

The music cuts. He dances for thirty seconds more. Stops.
MY DAD pulls out his binoculars, looks up.

I roll my trousers up, strip off my tie, jacket and shirt.

I take the bird hat out of the suitcase, and put on the bird hat.

I put on the MUSIC: 'I Was at School' by My Two Toms.
I do my little jumping dance.



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FOOTNOTES: FN1: Sandburg, C: 'The Sea Hold'; FN2: www.fictionalize.org/index.php?2006/03/01/5-trespassers-w; FN3: Monologue from closing sequence: ‘The Thin Red Line,’ 1998, Dir / Screenplay: Terence Malick, Based on the Novel by James Jones, screened 5.11.07, ITV. 11.05PM – 02.00AM, 6.11.07 (recorded on VHS), played, heard, transcribed: 6.11.07, 9.25PM approximately. FN4: Keillor, G: 'Lake Wobegone Boy', 1998, p253.

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TEXTS ADAPTED FROM: Jacques Brel / Sandra Bowes / John Hammond / Roscoe Holcombe.