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Issue 16 November 2009
www.blankmediacollective.org www.myspace.com/blankmediacollective You can also find us on other social networking websites such as; Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Art Review & many more.... blankpages submission guidelines: www.blankmediacollective.org/blankpages blankpages email: editor@blankmediacollective.org blankpages submission guidelines: www.blankmediacollective.org/blankpages General enquiries info@blankmediacollective.org Communications communications@blankmediacollective.org Exhibitions exhibitions@blankmediacollective.org BlankMarket market@blankmediacollective.org Special Projects projects@blankmediacollective.org Blank Media Presents... movingimage@blankmediacollective.org blankpages copyright © 2006-2009. Blank Media Collective unless otherwise noted. Copyright of all artworks, remains with artist. Blank Media Collective logo copyright © Ben Rose 2008 www.graphicstateofmind.com. blankpages logo © Eleni Angelou www.eleniaangelou.com
Contents P2 P3 P4 P5 P6 P8 P13 P15 P17 P19 P20 P22 P23
Contents Welcome Cover artist //Mika Nash This month’s MP3//Irma Vep Blank Media Presents....review Poetry Special//Justin Walsh Poetry Special//Dominic Berry Poetry Special//John Leyland Gerry Potter interview Blankpicks//The Complete Roberta Breitmore Spotlight//Phillip Marsden Blankpicks//By Phil Craggs Blank Media Recommends
Welcome I’m very proud to be introducing November’s issue of blankpages. This month we have a treat in the
form of our poetry special, including an incendiary interview with Manchester’s foremost performance poet, Gerry Potter. Alongside this is a bumper crop of the usual top quality poetry for your consumption. Huge thanks for this particular issue go to Jack Welsh, this month’s guest visual designer. He has taken valuable time out of his rehearsal schedule for Hollyoaks (where he will be appearing as himself in the near future...) to produce a beautiful edition of our publication. On a more serious note, if you happen to be in the Parliament Street area of Liverpool, head on through Leaf Cafe and check out Arena Studios and Gallery, where you will find Jack Welsh, and a host of other artists and exhibitions. Well worth a look. More serious a note still is the responsibility that producers of art should feel to reflect what is happening in the wider world, indeed comment on it through their art, and there’s no shortage of controversial goings on in said wider world at the moment. I wonder how many of you, readers, watched ‘Question Time’ recently? It cannot go without mention. Only a few days before that broadcast, the English Defence League ‘marched’ the streets of central Manchester. The weekend after that I found myself outside Manchester Town Hall, involved in a public burning of a giant ID card by the ‘No2ID’ campaigners I’d happened upon, orchestrated to highlight and demonstrate against the decision to guinea pig the ID card scheme on the citizens of Greater Manchester. A handful of passionate people with a valid point about deprivation of civil liberty, struggling for even a pinch of the publicity the political far right appears to be getting lately. Negative or otherwise, mass exposure feeds into public consciousness. Freedom of expression is not something to be compromised, indeed on the surface that’s the BBC’s reasoning for broadcasting what they did that night. Publications like blankpages are positioned perfectly to confidently defend this freedom and we intend to continue to do so.
John Leyland blankpages Editor
Blank Media Team Director: Mark Devereux Financial Administrator: Steven Porter Web Manager: Simon Mills Web: Matt Small Exhibitions Co-ordinators: Jamie Hyde, Marcelle Holt & Gareth Hacking Special Projects Co-ordinator: Petra Hoschtitsky Blank Media Presents... Manager: Iain Goodyear Blank Media Presents: Steve Goosens blankpages Team Editor: John Leyland Poetry Editor: Babia Auria Fiction Editor: Phil Craggs Music Editor: Dan Bridgwood-Hill Guest Visual Design by Jack Welsh Blank Media is kindly supported by:
This month’s cover artist is London based Surface Designer
and Illustrator Mika Nash. After graduating from Ravensbourne College of Design & Communication in 2006 with a degree in Fashion Textiles, Mika undertook various freelance work for clients such as Zandra Rhodes, Missprint and worked on the textiles for the ENO production of Aida, whose costume design was critically acclaimed by the press. Mika has exhibited twice at London Graduate Fashion Week in collaboration with Ewa Dauter and printing for Gold Award winning designer Jessica Au. She also featured in an exhibition at the Sayle Gallery in the Isle of Man in 2007 where she exhibited two original prints. At the turn of 2008, she decided to utilise her experience of the fashion industry to focus on surface design and illustration. This leap meant that Nash can employ her fashion training alongside her passion and talent for illustration. Her work is driven by experimentation and process; both texture and form, and is rooted in craft skills. The featured image on the front of blankpages is Shopping Cart, a five colour hand-screened poster. The work has an emphasis on colour and simplicity with cut-out colour shapes and hand drawn detail. An old knitting studio inspires this particular image where rolls of wool were stored, rather uniquely, in shopping trolleys. Mika is currently working as a freelance Designer & Printer whilst teaching screen-printing at the University of East London and is working toward exhibiting her work in November.
www.mikanash.co.uk
Cover artist:
mika NASH
This Month’s MP3 Irma Vep This month’s MP3 is by Welsh born, Manchester based musician/dancer Edwin
Stevens. Under the pseudonym Irma Vep, Stevens records and performs his solo material along with sometime collaborator Dylan ‘DBO’ Hughes who both play in the popular nu-reggae group ‘Klaus Kinski’. The attached track is A Bag Full of Bones (For Ella Jones)
Irma Vep fuses a mixture of styles with strong footings in Gothic and Blues sounds. You can catch Imra Vep on December 3rd at Islington Mill with Six Organs of Admittance in Salford. Visit www.myspace.com/blackballooons
Blank Media Presents... Saturday 26 September/Fuel Bar/Manchester
Tonight’s entertainment kicks off with local four-piece Id Of Mobius.
Having battled through various audio-visual technical problems they begin to emit subtle layers of cosmic drone. Two of them are hunched over a table splattered with an assortment of musical toys, mostly fist-sized digital boxes plugged into one another. An equally pedalled-up bass guitarist and violinist complete the quartet. The film playing in the background as an accompaniment sets the tone perfectly with astronauts, shuttles and earth (from afar) slowly moving around. It feels like the music was designed to be listened to whilst floating in space, and the group’s one major downfall is that they can’t afford to pay for us all to jet off through the clouds and perform the set on a space station somewhere.
Musically, it’s a take on the early 70’s Tangerine Dream records, but without anything actually happening! Changes are understated and difficult to spot as the set meanders through swirling drones and chirping synths. At onpoint, things quieten down with the violin taking the lead with slow downward slides, gradually being replaced by a throbbing keyboard. I would find it difficult to love this music, but it set a beautiful mood for half an hour or so.The following act could not have been more different if they’d tried. Maybe they did?! Shuddas are a 7-piece reggae/ska band who immediately brought a party to the venue. Prior to their set, the room got busier and busier, bursting at the seems by the time they started playing. The band obviously have a loyal following and you can see why – the grooves are tight and infectious and the musicians are all top-notch. In particular, the drummer has such a perfect swing to his style that you could not put it into words, unless you were Thurston Moore, in which case you’d probably say he was ‘in the pocket’.
The band have a swagger of arrogance and well-groomed hair to match, but one of the highlights of their performance is one that might easily be missed and is modestly hidden at the start of only a couple of the tunes - occasionally, the singer will pick up his guitar and play out the sweetest of melodies as the introduction to a song. It’s dealt with quickly, then they move on, but it’s a real treat for the careful listener. Unfortunately the overloaded PA system (it was loud) clouded the lyrical content, a factor which is so important in separating the wheat from the chaff with this sort of music. It is the crucial factor as to why such artists as Bob Marley or Sublime achieved the success they did. But that didn’t even come close to spoiling the party, so let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. With a gaggle of eager fans and none-stop dancing, Fuel experienced one hell of a shindig. After Shuddas have dismantled their gear, they leave the room, taking the revellers with them. It’s probably for the best; their booze-addled minds are almost certainly too far gone to appreciate the subtleties of the evening’s closing act Takahashi’s Shellfish Concern. The name is a strange one and it calls up memories of terrible 6th form indie bands.
“Don’t be put off; these guys But don’t be put off; these guys are something entirely different. They are made up of a percussionist, a guitarist and a painter. Their website claims they are something entirely aim to merge music and art as a single expression through the medium of collaborative improvisation, and that is exactly what they did. The opening different.” spidery guitar chords were accompanied by short, jutting scribbles by the artist eventually leading to a burst of red paint as the drummers cymbals came crashing in. I’m no expert in visual arts so I will reserve comment for someone much wiser but it was an enthralling insight and thoroughly enjoyable to watch. Musically the group delved into fairly familiar free-improv territory. The drummer used the Chris Corsano approach of adding a diverse selection of instruments to his kit, including a melodica, bits of metal and a wooden instrument with layers of strings that were tapped, bashed and scraped at various stages. Most effective amongst his arsenal were some electronic drum pads that triggered samples, really expanding the sound, especially when he used them to play some jazzy piano chords, initiating a confusingly addictive groove accompanied by the guitarist’s typically and brilliantly melodic bass line. At times, the symbiosis between the musicians and the painter seemed to wane, and it also seemed like the brush strokes followed the notes more often than the other way round, not quite living up to the two-way interaction they promise. However, these are minor issues that did not affect an enchanting performance and a fantastic idea. This really is one that needs to be seen rather than read about so I enthusiastically encourage you to go and watch them when their UK tour hits Manchester’s Dry Bar on October 22nd. Images: Mark Devereux
blankpages poetry special Justin Walsh I am fairly new to the Manchester poetry scene but have been writing for many years. I love the nonsense prose style of many British writers and feel that nonsense as a form is unique to these shores because of that Great British conundrum... our summer weather! Without an innate sense of the absurd how could our forefathers face another winter? I can be usually found the third Thursday of the month defending this theory at Freed Up, the GreenRoom’s open mic night. My poetry is peopled with grotesque creatures verbosely dressed in outlandish imagery; overblown abstractions that lurk in the shadows of the everyday. The poems included in this issue are pieces of a much bigger work that i have been writing for the last year - ‘PikniK on IlkLy MoOr’, of which there is a teaser on the Blank Media website. Almost completed, this abomination is nearly ready to be unleashed on unsuspecting Mancunians. Be Warned!
Justin Walsh
Gorilla in the Roses Did the flowers in your hair Scream when you picked them? Or did you plant them there? Standing slight yet squiffy With a ring, a ring of roses Who is this do you supposes? No, I don’t think its Moses More a black n hairy rascal. Dancing lonely, all aloneses. With a pocket full of poses Tickling beeses. On their noses Singing Me and Mrs Jonses Most brutish in demeanour The apeth prances tipy toses Muscles bursting from his bonses Quite churlishy proposing Darwin conjures his composing His theory he deposes As the Emporers new clotheses Quoting what he knows is Fairy Tales are most moroses Covered in sorosis Breath like halitosis He wantonley imposes Whilst deftly he exposesHimself That Gorilla in the Roses Image: Keiron Finnetty, Gorilla, ink on paper
This is Dog on a String
Lets play this tape forward. Through showers of silver light, Spider dreaming, stolen Giros and swimming born horses. Spools of dark passageways And ghosts of Christmas past. On pigeon wings, flightless, broken. The stumbled future now privy Hobbling, bleary, dog shit drizzled, City centre archways. Reel of Princess Parkway. Grey Floors, walls, ceiling, sky. Forgotten linen flaps on pubic washing line. Chains flush, turniquet blooms, beneath lamp lights. Cast no shadow, no reflection. Jostle over this dimp, that scrap. Foaming mouthed refuges, Bickering in the Pavement gloom. Guttersnipe poltergeists, Dressed to kill. Me, an Armageddon Fagin. You, ‘The Artful Dodger’. ‘Rent and gent‘, she called us that, When there was room, still, for us to laugh. Four arms, legs 2 heads, the other half to the puzzle Pouring the lodgers cup into each other. We share T Shirts, trainers, undies n’works.
Justin Walsh
Living in your pocket, You in mine. slipping endlessly through the holes, The cracks, The Crack. Bruised arms an ordinance survey map, Of this time and that, Adventures once had. Like John and Yoko, bed ins for days. We never kiss though, never spoon. Back to back, You and me. ‘Spoons are only good for cooking up.’ You smile when you say it. I scream into my pillow, I think that you know. ‘I can’t‘, you still say, ‘I just can’t’ Pushing me away to that place in your past Scene fades into white noise of traffic. trumpets chorus for Coronation Street adverts and teddy bears picnic ice cream van White blood freezes like the first rust of cocaine, When you once Held me at arms length, Eyes thick with Autumn tears as yet uncried, That trickled leaves and formed ship canals of, Pink, clean, pink satin. Beneath the dirt and grime of another night. I wait, I pray For all of this to end. And toast Mayflies, toast Mayflies.
Parlour Games I’ll finish this on Monday If that’s ok with you? If this procures a problem Next Saturday will do This really got her wild up A chip pan in a stew But who’d have dreamt that donkeys Were melted down for glue? That Irksome little madam Who’d wandered here and there At time as lonely as a cloud L’esprit de l’escalier Her forthright inclined nature Had won her many friends The one that wrote this poem Suffered from the bends Her favourite thing was hide and seek Upon a rainy day She hid and sought and hid some more A puckish imp at play
Justin Walsh
The friends I mentioned earlier Were never really there They played and danced in time you see A creak upon a stair But in the mirror looking back She could be quite anyone The blue baboon from hathersage The beast of windy knoll Nothing really matters Like a theatre in the round AS logik sense and reason Are built on shaky ground. a séance in the afternoon A storm cloud in the bay The mist that roles in from the sea A momrath gone astray. A fangle in the attic Singing tra la la lee Who’d have guessed that Rhinos horns Were grinded up for tea?
Dominic Berry Author of “Tomorrow, I Will Go Dancing” (flapjack press 2008) and co-host of “Freed Up” (Manchester’s busiest, and friendliest, monthly poetry open mic) Dominic Berry has just won the Commonword “Superheroes” of Slam” 2009 trophy. His one man performance poetry piece “Pulse” won a Forever Manchester Award from City Life when staged in the Not Part Of festival summer 2009. Dominic is currently working on a choose-your-own-adventure book, also to be published by Flapjack press.
You’re Not My Bass Line Balloon Brain Puff up my mind Once shrivelled wrinkles, now larger than your head. Rub it, it sticks to your jumper. Don’t prick me. I will burst.
I take drums. You’re not my bass line. Wouldn’t know you if you were. I hear no deep string plucked in every bar. I hear nothing. I need bottle. You’re not my optic. No one paces my intake. Take any wasted father’s order. I am young but will say I’m younger to a mature ear.
I want needles. You’re not my thread. I keep funking with hairy arsed junkies. Addicts crave me. Loose cotton, easily pulled. These men get wrapped up in me. I spill secrets. You didn’t keep Mum. Spill red, bed sheets. Spirit shots. Smear fluids. I tear stain wives. Wreck husband’s lives. I see you in older men’s eyes.
Dominic Berry
Love Hearts While other kids queued at the canteen tuck shop, I never ate at school.
Song We’re bob sledding down Dusty Springfield’s beehive, wind alive with drums and strings. Ears whipped, spin to ground. Racing pulses. Mine wins! This songbird unlocks a mind cage. Magic flits out, dips behind curtain rail. Close the window before it gets out! We dance in the kitchen. Sing to mug of tea.
In a woodwork class, Gareth touched me, once, then swore he hadn’t. My body bolted, squealed in his finger vice then he went back to mock SATs and secret tuck shop snacks. Peeling back wrappers, he’d suck rock like love hearts dust crumbled on his tongue, hidden sugar under his desk. He crunched mint laughed when fifth formers crunched me behind the tech block. Mum would hate him. I craved confection.
I’ve been shuffled to the edge my toes have tipped the flipped horizon of the valley. You don’t notice the rope ‘till it slips from your ankles and tugs at the breath you have left.
John Leyland is a writer, poet and performer currently based in Manchester. A graduate from Liverpool John Moores University in Imaginative Writing, he is Editor of blankpages. John performs his poetry regularly in venues across Manchester and the North West and is an irregular compere with Liverpool’s Dead Good Poets Society. With strong opinions, high standards and a distinctive voice, John is an experienced creative facilitator. He has been published in various anthologies, including among others; In The Red (Issues 3 and 4, for LJMU), Poetry Pool 2 and 3 (Headland) and The Ugly Tree (Flapjack Press). John’s poem Bloukranz is published in Issue 20 of The Ugly Tree (Flapjack Press)
John Leyland
There’s a guy asking me where I slept last night what music I like but I’m not thinking Talking Heads, Knysna Heads, Port Elizabeth drug den slums, I can’t think of what I did last night or what I’m doing right now or looking down or that desperate woman yellow-eyed and writhing, how she showed me how to hold the special pipe and inhale. You don’t notice the rope ‘till it slips from your ankles and there’s the tug, the breathless panic and up! Rewinding, weightless. The sky is distant brown flowing estuary and dusty luscious bush rotating, silent as the tension in the cord slackens.
BLOUKRANZ
The Biological Sunday’s light shines through a rainbow of flesh, glazed, cured, suspended in slices sensational, Gunther’s insatiable public shocked and strolling this exhibition is alive. Gunther always starts the day with porridge or an apple. Monday bears a child, a boy; a foot, a hand, a thigh, a tumour imprinted in a tiny brain. Gunther’s wife complains he used to stink like a chemical plant. They never watch television. I am entranced kneeling at the cabinet - my father is here faulty organ lumps and glass, the biological between us, Mum and Dad and me. I want to see around it, get right beside its underside, inspect the kidney’s poly cysts.
We talk about it like it’s his, like it’s him, this bloated specimen. Seven bulbous fists adjoined and on display with emphysema glaring from a lung, grey like a captured piece of magma splurge, cooled and showing its effects. Gunther mentally dissects passengers and cabin crew alike on international flights between appointments he follows their bones their muscle movements with silent grace, his fingers trace incisions in recycled air. Wednesday wakes his father’s memories of war and keeping bees, and Thursday’s heart is kept beating inside a lifeless mother, and another child is born of her, Aya, two days post.
John Leyland
Fight For This Love
In his first interview as himself, Gerry Potter is a stripped down scouse legend residing in Manchester. Gingham is gone, he is sans wig, talking exclusively to blankpages Editor, John Leyland, about his new book of poetry Planet Young (Flapjack Press).
The stage persona he inhabited for 15 years, Chloe Poems, was the Wirral Peninsula’s last bastion of alternative queer
thinking in a genius performance package. She courted artistic notoriety and international exposure - so why did she have to go? “I’d gone as far as I could with Chloe, the character couldn’t say any more. And she’d said a lot. What else was left for her to say? There’s a shelf life to it, and there should be. Drag personas are more vicious, and there’s a liberation a frock gives you, being outside of society.” So Planet Young is a reaction to that? Was it your intention from the outset to be so deeply personal and autobiographical? “I’ve had a colourful life, and it was time to openly write about it. It was interesting getting my voice back, doing poems in my own voice. Chloe’s voice was physically different. After being so large and colourful, there was a release in being quiet and conversational. Chloe wanted to change the world, I wanted to understand mine. I stopped wanting to tell the world it was wrong. Chloe became like a superhero, something I’d always wanted to be, but gentility and honesty are strengths - I’ve probably been more honest with the book than even close friends.” So the book is a vehicle for emotional honesty? Was there a sense of unmasking, when you stopped performing as Chloe? “A lot of people ask, is the mask ever lowered? But no, I didn’t feel masked. Until you’re on stage you feel vulnerable. I did a lot of very straight pubs in the most bizarre places, where they didn’t expect to see drag. I was very visible and vulnerable, but it offered me much anonymity. When the show is over, it’s over. I’d get changed really quickly and be able to see and hear what people thought – as if I’d been in the audience. I miss the game of it. Now, more people know who I am. I’m not a big persona.” People might disagree with that... “Chloe was a clown. The character and look made me able to be louder about what I politically felt.” Your play, Miracle, certainly wasn’t quiet... The tale of a well hung gay porn star with a mysterious ability to cure terminal disease by having sex with the afflicted... “Writing it was essential. It’s about what would happen if the impossible happened. What would the religions do? It’s about the supernatural; how do you make it real? Theatre shouldn’t be television with legs, and I’m bored of social drama about single mums.
We’ve seen that. We know that. It should be about asking hard questions. It has the capacity. People go to the theatre because it can suspend their disbelief.Miracle made me realise theatre is dead. It’s supposed to be interesting. But it’s too frightened of losing its funding. So we get tiresome plays about things that don’t matter. Don’t get me wrong, some companies can do marvellous things. But I don’t want to see another coming out play as long as I live. Unless it’s remarkable.” Do you see anything remarkable happening in Manchester? “The Manchester performance scene has to grow up. There are pockets of people who are wonderful, a few interesting new voices coming through, but it’s so bland. It’s like watching rain evaporate into the air to become rain again. Nothing’s happening.” “I don’t want to sound too Simon Cowell but get involved in your writing, your performance, involve yourself. It shouldn’t just be loud thinking. It’s a disservice to the whole ethos of the spoken word. People do things about making scones or going to the shops. We can all do that. Where’s the colour? The passion, the commitment to storytelling? t’s encouraging the banal. We so often complain about spoken word being ignored, but it should be ignored if it’s boring. It will remain unrecognised, and should be, if it’s dull.” Do you feel a sense of responsibility to performance? “A performance should be decorative and truthful. I have a proud theatrical background. I owe it to myself. I’d die if I didn’t perform.” So why publish a book of poetry? “If you’re writing a play, the writing has to be brilliant or the play doesn’t work. I write to perform, and I don’t want to perform a shit bit of writing. A lot of performance poetry has no soul, no passion or drama in the writing. They’re telling you mundane things in a mundane way. There’s no electricity, no communication. I’m a damn good writer. Writing to me is indelibly important. A performance is only as good as the writing.” And how important is independence, in terms of publication? “I’m stubborn, things are on my terms. If I went to a big company they’d want to change what I do. My writing has been working for a very long time, it’s endorsed by the audience. My publisher’s never ever edited my work. They’d be murdered if they tried to. You cannot change it.There’s a punk rock element to what I do, a very late 70s vibe. Form often bores me. I like artists who are not afraid to veer. Chloe went to Harvard. She’s in the Poetry and Philosophy libraries there. Would this have happened if I’d been formulaic? A lot of what gets the intellectual support is dull as dishwater. We should challenge those scenarios. We should bend the rules.” Planet Young by Gerry Potter is available now from Flapjack Press (www.flapjackpress.co.uk) Follow Gerry Potter on myspace at www.myspace.com/gerrypotterpoet
blankpicks The Complete Roberta Breitmore is a contradiction in terms. This new exhibition (at The Whitworth Art Gallery) of
artefacts from the “life” created and performed by Lynn Hershman Leeson over a four year period in San Francisco in the 1970s is in fact a fragmented collection of fascinating keepsakes, like a memory box exploded on the mezzanine of the gallery. I have a feeling this sense of contradiction and fragmentation is central to the artist’s original intent. Collaged photographs of herself as Roberta Breitmore hang on the walls, adorned with her scrawled descriptions of “typical” physical traits of a “schizoid personality”. Her experiment in San Francisco comes across like a deconstruction of self and by extension, the artistic process and how art is consumed and viewed. Still a very fertile creative area, and very bold indeed. Aside from the very striking collages, there are personal ads from Roberta published in the local press, responses to these, and photographic evidence of encounters with the general public. One of my favourites is a signed birthday card addressed to Roberta from Hilary Clinton. The work appears to have something to prove, or at least the arrangement of objects and curios seems to whisper “believe me...”
This is of course the problem inherent in constructed identity - believability, the manipulation of sincerity. A question is posed to the onlookers – what can be considered a complete representation of the complicated human sense of self? And what will be left behind of it when that self no longer treads the earth? The tangibility of these objects at the Whitworth is of interest in response to these questions. What currently defines our constructed identities? It is a disarming experience viewing Roberta’s existence in this way, but the objects satisfy the voyeur inside me, in fact leave me wanting more of these disconnected titbits. We are increasingly virtual in our interaction with the world, and I’m not sure the way we define ourselves these days will be quite so engaging to an onlooker in 30 years’ time. The Complete Roberta Breitmore runs at The Whitworth, Manchester until Summer 2010. Words by John Leyland. Image: Lynn Hershman Leeson, Roberta and Irwin Meet for the First Time in Union Square, (detail) 1975
It isn’t overtly difficult to recognise works produced by the hand of Liverpool based
illustrator Phillip Marsden. Whatever the guise of his work takes, be it cartoons, comics or illustrations, it is certain that it will bear the hallmarks of his unique style of draftsmanship, humour and applied technique. Drawing on his fine art training (excuse the pun) Marsden utlises his varied and skilful repertoire of drawing techniques to create a rich world full of memorable characters and unique perspectives. Some of these characters are often based upon him, a fact he draws attention to via the title of his current solo exhibition ‘True Stories by PM’ at Richmond Gallery in London. His next comic book will be also emblazoned with this title and will contain new work drawing on recent experiences including a strip inspired by his appearance on Antony Gormley’s ‘One & Other’ Fourth Plinth project earlier in the summer (right image).
In 2004 he founded Compromise Comics Enterprise to (self) publish the first issue of Clam & Elgar etc, a comic book chat show hosted by its eponymous heroes. He took the name of his first issue from a still unwritten graphic novel, The Wizard of Eternal Compromise. Marsden has continued to produce more comix and zines including fables, fairytales, and downright filth (in the form of the Blackout series – a lewd collaboration with artist Jack Fallows and writer Phillip Buchan, featuring my personal favourite the hilarious albeit sexually rampant Sexoskeleton, an undead amorist with a rapist’s wit!) His recent work, Chandlers Quay, a spoof detective story that is equal parts Raymond Chandler and Paul Auster, was written and drawn in 24 consecutive hours in response to the exhibition briefing of ‘Drawn In’ which examined the process and the act of drawing. By delineating the terms of the 24 hour ‘challenge’ (devised by comics artist Scott McCloud) within the story itself, he frames a period of activity which would normally be protracted (or drawn-out). The lo-fi and DIY nature of self-publishing forces Marsden to settle for (or rather, to embrace) certain qualitative inconsistencies (such as how an ink drawing looks when photocopied – or indeed rendered as a PDF), which all contribute to the varied range of his work. Current and future projects for Marsden include his Penguin ‘Sailor Gerry’ which will form part of Liverpool’s Go Penguins! trail this winter, the introduction of web commix as well as a comic book app for iPhone in the pipeline. - Words by Jack Welsh For more information or to purchase his work on visit www.phillipmarsden.com True Stories by PM at Richmond Gallery, London runs until November 28th and Phillip will be undertaking an all day workshop on the 14th.
Every so often I find myself having to justify my
love of b-sides to someone. After all, aren’t they just the songs that weren’t good enough to make it on to the album? The problem with this attitude is that sometimes bands have rubbish taste in their own music. I came across the most striking example I’ve ever heard of this today when I played the new album by Editors, In This Light And On This Evening for the first time. The album itself is nine songs long and features a new, synth-heavy sound. And, based on a couple of listens, it’s a decent, if not quite spectacular effort. I nterestingly, the band admitted nearly not including one of the best tracks (‘Eat Raw Meat = Blood Drool’) until their producer convinced them to. This becomes more interesting when you listen to the five-track second disc that comes with the special edition of the album. Entitled Cuttings II it features songs that did not make it onto the final album track-listing - and every single one of them should have. They’re brilliant, and I can’t understand how they didn’t make the cut over some of the more average album tracks. My reading has been a mixed bag recently. I gave up on Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus after 80 pages because I could not bring myself to read any
more. It’s the fictional biography of a composer, as written by a friend of his. This friend admits to not being a good writer, and Mann makes sure his prose is less than professional. The problem is that poor prose is poor prose, whether deliberate or accidental. Thankfully, I’ve had the joy of re-reading Italo Calvino’s wonderful The Complete Cosmicomics in which every story is a little master-class in the storyteller’s art. Beautifully written, full of imagination, humour and startling imagery, it’s an absolute delight. I’m also gearing myself up to try to read Dante’s The Divine Comedy. I read Inferno a while ago, but then got a complete edition with beautiful illustrations by Gustave Doré which I’m as eager to study properly as I am to read the text. The publishers, Capella, have made a bit of a series of these books (which you can get pretty cheap in both hard- and paper-back if you’re lucky) – I have Doré-illustrated editions of Milton’s Paradise Lost and Coleridge’s The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner as well and the illustrations are equally stunning – imaginative, detailed, and just plain beautiful. Words by Phil Craggs
blankpickss
Blank Media Recommends... The Bowery/Leeds A group exhibition featuring new photographic work by artists:
Adam Booth/Salley Charnley/Bethaney Rose/Samantha Wass/ Stephanie Ballentine/Espen Krukhaug Highlights include John Whiteheads investigations into the quotidian properties of objects, Adam Booth’s long exposure shots that focus on aspects of isolation via situationalism and Samantha Wass’ documentation of an abandoned tuberculosis hospital in Beelitz-Heilstatten, in former East Germany.
www.thebowery.org
TAXED: Slide Slam 2/ A Foundation Liverpool Friday 13 November, evening The last event in the series of A-Foundation’s TAXED events, a programme of artist led events that steal (or ‘tax’ as the Liverpudlian phrase goes) from exsisting events within the art realm.Ending the series will be the event that started it all off back in January, taxed from Art In General, New York. A selection of artists and creatives will be invited to present three minute slide presentations on subjects of their choosing, with the aim of encouraging and creating critical debate in response to what transpires in these 180 seconds.
www.afoundation.org.uk/liverpool