Pies and pasties

Okay, going to use this blog to exercise the grey matter a bit more by taking a photo and attempting a piece of Hint Fiction most days. Here’s lame attempt one:

“Did you leave your brain on the pillow?” she asked, handing him his coffee. He tried to smile, but his stomach sunk as she laughed.

some feral cats - by Sara Golemon

I was recently involved in delivering some training for the Retooled project, working  a group of ex-Rover MG employees who were made redundant when the company went bust 5 years ago and to create a resource for those facing or going through redundancy.

The two, day-long workshops were pretty amazing and I got to hear some eye-opening stories. During the afternoon of the first workshop, myself and Retooled team member John Barnett had a little look at some online material about Longbridge that’s out there, which he put into context for me in some recorded conversations.  It was during one of these conversations that John, who looked after the car plant’s IT network, told me about the rats that chewed through the cabling and the army of feral cats that fed off them:

The biggest problem was rats, actually. There was actually a budget line of £10,000 per year which was called the Rat Fund, which was there for repairing cables that had been gnawed through by rats. Mainly due, bizarrely, because BMW had got rid of all the Factory Cats and the Factory Cats used to keep the rats down. But BMW didn’t like the cats. They used to look more like miniature lions than cats, and they ate all the rats. But after they got rid of the cats the rat population increased amazingly and all the fibre cables got chewed through on a regular basis.

Although the small army of ferocious, feral Factory Cats were tolerated by Rover ‘because they were really useful’, BMW in their wisdom decided to dispose of them because ‘they looked untidy and they didn’t want them there’.

If you listen to my interview with John (below) you can hear me get slightly stuck on this topic, which he mentions almost in passing.  And I’ve not really stopped thinking about it since.  How did BMW dispose of the cats exactly? Was it done humanely? Does anyone have any pictures of them? WHAT HAPPENED TO THE POOR FACTORY CATS?

Longbridge – demolition of Eastworks, Westworks, Southworks, etc. by getgood

Mila’s Daydreams – Thanks to Pete Ashton for alerting me to this blog from Adele Enerson of her well cute baby photos:

This blog is my maternity leave hobby. While my baby is taking her nap, I create scene around her and take quick snap photos.

Which is gorgeous. But what I was struck by was the way Adele’s found a really simple way to exercise her creative juices every day – without leaving the house, using the bits and bobs that happen to be lying around for props and her camera. Each baby-naptime, Adele has a quick go at creating and telling a simple story with a picture, with some amazing results.

It made me want to do something similar in some sort of attempt to keep the creative bit of my brain alive, be it by letting Tyrone (who’s not been on any travels of late) see the world from within my home or by taking a stab at some Hint Fiction (hat tip Nick Lockey). Just something nice and simple to creak the cogs in my head and stop them from completely seizing up.

I’ll let you know how I get on!

Bulgaria - David Cerny's Entropa

Artist David Cerny upset pretty much all of Europe with his hoax artwork Entropa, with its cliched representations of each European nation, but it managed to particularly outrage Bulgaria by portraying it with a series of connected Turkish squat toilets.

I actually found these to be few and far between and they weren’t that bad – they took a little bit of getting used to but they did seem well designed to let gravity take its natural course, as it were.

But before we got to Bela Rechka I was warned about ‘The Dark Place’ – the one toilet behind the old school building used by  Goat Milk festival goers.  When I got there we discovered that a load of portaloos had been bought in for this year’s festival, which I was told I should be thankful for.  I discovered why when I found the old school toilet:

The Dark Place

Above is a very short film (my batteries ran out) of people singing a Bulgarian folk song we all learned in a Singing Society Workshop of Bela Rechka Songs at the Goat Milk Festival.  Of course, we sang it in Bulgarian but the English translation really got me thinking.

The lyrics are pretty funny in a sort of sinister way.  They made me ask all sorts of questions in my head – were the narrator and the object of his affection involved in an affair?  Or, what creepily occurred to me, was he a total stranger/mild acquaintance to her?  Was she blissfully sailing through life, happy with her husband, unaware that this man silently watched them whilst they slept, plotting murder?  Is this song the narrator’s declaration of a fully requited love, or the moment some poor woman learns she’s being stalked by a psychopath? Have I watched too many thriller films? The mind boggles.

Todorka’s Song

Now you ask me in whose name
Last night to your place I came,
Why I jumped o’er your quickset,
What was there for me to get.

I am younger than your husband
And I’m not afraid of strife,
In my belt I keep my hardened
Trusty friend, my sharp-edged knife.

The night was dark, on top of that
I sneaked as slyly as a cat,
Through your window I did peep,
You and he were fast asleep.

There I sat down in your yard,
Knife in hand bot strong and hard
Waiting for your man to come
For to crush him like a crumb.

By your bed a candle’s burning,
You’re asleep, my stomach’s churning
With a flame so wild and hot
That I’ll burst there on the spot.

Gazing at your candlelight
I didn’t notice that the night,
Weakenig, had taken flight
And the dawn was shining bright.

The nightingale had just begun
Singing for the rising sun
And I saw your face again,
Smiling through the windowpane.

Recognizing your dear face
I stopped short and checked my pace:
“Next time, nightingale” I said,
Through the quickset back I fled.

That is why I came to you
Last night in the chilly dew.
Mind you, one of us will die -
It is either he or I.

(Translation: Kristin Dimitrova)

YouTube – grey fluffy clouds – I’m sure this will be old news to many, but this spoof of The Orb’s Little Fluffy Clouds made me laugh like a drain. Courtesy of The League Against Tedium (via Sandra Hall).  This guy’s video of it gets extra speshul points for mishearing ‘Watford’ as ‘Walford’.

Last month I was lucky enough to go the amazing Goat Milk Festival in Bela Rechka, Bulgaria with Friction Arts:

…an event that tries to put the questions about personal memories and collective memory (a ”high voltage” question in our society) in a new perspective and environment – offering at one hand the relaxed ambiance of one authentic Bulgarian Balkan village like Bela Rechka with its hospitality, goat milk and walnut trees and, on the other hand, innovative and new approaches from the European debates and art world in the field of memories, identity and new culture.

As you can probably guess, it was pretty amazing and although I’m not going to blog any big conclusions from the experience just yet, I’d like to put a couple of odds and ends here.  Thanks to a lost camera, they don’t amount to much but there are a couple of recordings I wanted to publish.

The first is a small clip and photo from a bread-making workshop at the festival, lead by the baker at Sunmoon Organic Bakery & Vegetarian Restaurant in Sofia.  If you ever find yourself in Sofia, be sure to seek them out for a good meal washed down with some nice beer.

I spent the Easter weekend in South Wales visiting my family, which meant I was at my Dad’s house in Caerphilly for the 4am project on Sunday 4th April.  Now on recent visits to Caerphilly I’ve noticed an increasing amount of Tom Cooper’s dotted around the town, where he was born.  It seems we have the Caerphilly-based Tommy Cooper Society to thank for this – they are capitalising on the connection despite the fact that his family moved to Exeter when he was three.

The Tommy Coper Society raised the funds for a Tommy Cooper statue in the town centre, which is what I made a beeline for at 4am.  His big, beaming face grinning down at me looked downright sinister in the darkness of night.  It was kind of scary.

But it wasn’t as scary as the bunny that stands at the foot of the sculpture, which was trying to crush The Courthouse pub down the road with its giant paw.

Tommy’s bunny wasn’t the only animal I came across. I met this very cold-looking cat sitting on a front doorstep.

The other beasts I saw were on bins.  There seems to be a trend in Caerphilly of people decorating their wheelie bins with squirrels and the like, it’s very odd.

Those that didn’t pimp up their bins indicated the house number in the normal way with paint, but even that could look quite funky in a distressed sort of way.

This is what I love about the 4am project, it really makes you notice things in your surroundings that you just don’t tend to see in the hustle and bustle of daytime life.

The big 4am project date is barely over, but organiser Karen Strunks isn’t resting on her laurels.  She’s just announced an extra special 4am outing to the Birmingham Museum Collections Centre this Saturday, an Aladdin’s cave of historical treasures in Nechells.  Who knows what you might notice there in the dark and quiet of night?

Embedding this here purely because I can!  Philip Donnellan’s lovely 1965 film The Irishmen, which for some insane reason has never been transmitted by the BBC, is now available to watch in full on Google videos.  The documentary tells the stories of Irish people who came over to the UK and found themselves literally building post-war Britain in what looks like back-breaking laboring work.  The film has some lovely music and tells a largely unheard story.  Well worth taking an hour’s break to watch it. Cheers to Paul Long for the heads up.

On 19th Feb I went along to The Story – a lovely day-long ‘celebration of everything that is wonderful, inspiring and awesome about stories’.  It felt incredibly indulgent, spending the day listening to different people tell their stories in different ways, but it was definitely a day well spent.  The Story ‘was a very selfish event’ organised by Matt Locke ‘because I wanted to go to an event like this’.  Fortunately what Matt wants struck a chord with everyone there, who thoroughly enjoyed the day.  I really hope we’ll see more of the same next year.

The real highlight for me was experiencing the genius that is Tim Etchells.  I don’t think I’ve known what it is to sob with laughter before hearing him describe a man showing someone a picture of his children by drawing stick figures on a napkin.  You had to be there.  I was fortunate enough to get the chance to chat to him over the mid-morning break.  Unfortunately, I was far too awe-struck to say anything much beyond, “That were great.”  Sorry Tim.

I decided to make a London weekend of things so stayed over in a teeny, tiny EasyHotel pod.  On Saturday I made my way to Kings Cross for the Shoot Experience Capture Kings Cross event, which explored the variety of themes and influences from the British Library’s Points of View exhibition.  It was kind of a photography treasure hunt – participating teams were given a sheet of clues to Kings Cross locations and handed in their camera’s memory card of photographed answers at the end of the afternoon. My friend Jennie and I had a great day running around Kings Cross trying to find answers and inspiration and snapping away.  Above is the slideshow of images we submitted in response to these clues – can you match them up?:

FIXED CLUES
A. Once number eight of nine, a gas provider in its prime, now standing alone awaiting renewal.
B. This place of worship has proved Hardy against advancing development since AD 313.
C. This basin has long since washed its hands of ice and is now a cultural Place ft for a King.
D. For an aerial view of the Regeneration around, head to this old House – follow York and onto the Wharf.
E. From Industrial coal yard to a Natural revolution this Park is an ornately gated hidden gem.
F. Cut from the same brick as its neighbourly station, this tower of text houses the photographic history to inspire your journey today.

OPEN CLUES
G. The Camera Never Lies
H. Making Tracks

I’d love to see Shoot Experience do something in Birmingham.  Although their events are mainly London ones it seems they do sometimes venture North, and there’s definitely enough people in Birmingham up for having a fun day out with their cameras to warrant it.

On Sunday I just fancied chilling by watching a film so headed to The Renoir Cinema in Russell Square to catch a screening of Michael Heneke’s astonishing The White Ribbon.  The 3-hour film (which doesn’t feel like it) tells the story of ‘A village in protestant northern Germany.  1913-1914.  On the eve of World War I.’

On the face of it village life is ordered and harmonious, with the villagers happy with their place within the pecking order of the traditional feudal system.  But strange things start happening – ‘Who tied the wire to trip the Doctor?  Who set fire to the barn?  Did you ever wonder who tortured Karli?’  The local schoolteacher takes it upon himself to investigate and discovers the seemingly idyllic society is, under the surface, rotten to the core, with those who should be righting the wrongs too fearful to face up to them and preferring to turn the other way.

Of course a lot of reviewers took this as a precursory tale to the horrors of Nazi Germany: ‘Did these events contain the germs of the tragedies that followed?’  What it screamed to me was just how contagiously toxic bad elements within communities often are, and how harmful smoothing over the cracks can be.