Play (Summer 2010)

University of Bristol Creative Arts Magazine

Summer 2010

y a l p Poetry足

Prose

Art

Photography

Features

EDITORIAL We’re being replaced, so watch this space and keep a weather eye on the website to keep up to date with the new editors. The end is nigh. Go forth and play.

Love as always,

Editors

Anisa Ghuloom Sarah Sternberg

Hannah Alton Isabel Blake

Poetry Editors

Prose Editors

Rebecca Jewitt Claudia Tobin

Jack Castle Eleanor Fogg

Art Editors

Sarah and Anisa

Tom Brooks Emma Davies Helen Graham Photography Editors

Jessie Atkinson Sophie Wright

Cover Photo : Tristan Martin

Features Editors

Promotions Officers

Arabella Field Tom Strickland Imogen Schäfer Poetry Events

Kit Buchan

Rosie Levine

When do we lose it? That total concentration on the object of our attention, the game we’re playing. Somewhere in the crucible of adolescence we surrender that sense of joy, that innocent abandon.

Reclaim your birthright, relearn how to play. The silly jokes, the childish antics, aren’t these the times we remember with the greatest fondness? In a world where being laughed at is seen as some form of social death, have we sacrificed that most humanizing of traits?

Gideon Shapiro

Rajitha Ratman & Alex Sheppard

Emma Davies

A Brief Interview with Mr. Twizzle, Clown What do you do when children cry after seeing you?

Sometimes I cry too. Or I squirt water or fall on the floor or take down my trousers. They like it when I pull things out of their ears.

Generally making myself seem like a fool and showing inferiority is the key. The fear of clowns is called coulrophobia. Some people literally have panic attacks and stuff when they see me in costume.

That used to be pretty scary for me but I’m used to it now. What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you in a circus tent? My appendix practically exploded once whilst I was juggling knives. That was bad. I started screaming, then all the kids started screaming as well. Why choose clowning? In every year at school there’s one isn’t there? In every social group you find a clown. It’s an essential component. Someone has to act the fool to reduce tension. People need to laugh, people need to see an exaggeration of life. It’s a conduit of release. I’m not going to change the world but I can make people happy. Behind the face paint I’m just an ordinary guy, but no one wants to know that. Being Mr Twizzle is freedom for me. I paint my face and I can adopt this colourful and noisy character. I love it.

Hannah Alton

The galli were men who pretended to be women for a while and then actually made themselves women by cutting off their own testicles. They were the priests of the Roman Magna Mater cult. Part of their initiation consisted of auto-castration. Then the men threw their testicles down the street and took the clothing of the women of the house whose doorstep their balls landed on.

When stuff like that gets done, and people think that it’s important, its impossible not to think of everything as play.

Thus spake Johannes Huizinga. Huizinga says everything is play. Religion is play. Language is play.

Society is play. Anything that does not pertain to real life, anything free, anything with no material interest is Play. We are the featherhead hominidae. I don’t really know if Huizinga’s ideas are outdated or unfashionable or wrong. But it’s a fun idea, that idea that it’s all a big game.

NB: Play is not as fun as it sounds, though. It can be seedy or gory. Sexual deviants always call it “a bit of fun,” but everybody knows experimental sex is for saddos. Capitalists talk about “games,” but only shitbags mean business. Play bleeds people. Play nightmared neanderthals. Peoples always kill each other because they disagree with the rules.

Actually killing each other was initially another game. I heard that before Shaka came to power, the Zulu used to engage in ritual warfare. They would have battles were nobody really died and the point was just to make sure everybody knew not to fuck with you. The Cold War was one of the biggest games I ever heard of. About twenty years after the real playing is over, you’re allowed to make little models and games about them! How fucked up is that!

There is something citric and burlesque about stuff like the Spanish inquisition, that I would basically call fun. There are pictures of the Manson family and Nazis and Cecil Rhodes at play. I know that’s not quite the point but think how fun it must have been to be in the Manson family. For that matter, think how fun the British Empire was.

I suppose a part of looking at stuff they done in the olden days is forgetting the bad bits and just remembering the fun, but even now there’s stuff that feels fun. We should really bin the House of Lords, and the American dream and papal infallibility but they’re such fun.

Israel is a pretty fun idea. So is tweed.

I know I didn’t really make a point, it’s just fun to think about the permutations of shit like that. Be nice to me, anyway. I just pawned my typewriter so that we could go and weekend together.

Aidan Cottrell Boyce Illustration by Menna Cominetti

playi Looking out of the window I get jealous of the pigeons, except when it rains and they scrunch into themselves defiantly.

Maybe they think that if the clouds don’t recognise them then they won’t get wet. There’s something really sexy about wings. Once my friends and I got drunk and watched some porn with an angel and a man in a warrior costume. In retrospect I think that when you start playing in bushes you stop playing in trees. It’s a shame really. I miss sap-stained palms and barkrubbings for knees.

The correct term is ‘Frottage’. An indexical image of crumbling wax crayon and crumpled paper. See Max Ernst. See also Max Ernst: Surrealism and Dream Imagery. When he was young he dreamt that he had a pet bird. The night that it died he awoke to his father announcing that his sister had just been born.

Sometimes he paints this bird into his pictures as an extension of his ego. It’s called Loplop. I wonder what I dreamt of the night my sister was born. I used to have an imaginary friend called Michelangelo. After the mutant ninja hero turtle, not the artist.

Tom Brooks

10

ng in trees

Sophie Wright

11

Tristan Martin

12

13

prime of youth This is the Second Act. The cross-eyed ache and tight dry lips, picking the fat dried on my jeans from a hazy feast of chips in the last bold hour of teens for our ‘beat’ Birthday Boy who chucked his gutful into the dark.

Today we dig for gold.

Rooting through the scattered frames to find the clearest gems to mould and polish in memory’s name.

For all we know tomorrow could be the end of it.

The years we lived outside the sad cycle from number to title; The days we will know as the Prime of Youth and exclaim over working lunches who we were once, as if it were a role we played, and never really truth.

Last night we danced and drank in heated sways, pulled the puppet strings of smiles, blinked at the moon eclipsed by the dial then woke for a part in the matinee.

Patrick Burley

14

Jessie Atkinson

15

Sophie Wright

16

James Wright

gambling “Monopoly was my favourite game as a child. I loved those little houses. Sometimes, I would steal them from the box and build miniature cities in shoeboxes hidden in my wardrobe. I still dream of owning a whole row of townhouses on Park Row. If I don’t win this, I won’t have a house at all.”

Eleanor Fogg

playing chess When I was seven I was convinced I needed to learn chess. I’d watched a news report about a chess championship which had shown a room full of men staring intently at black-and-white boards. Enthused with girl power I persuaded my encouraging grandmother to buy me an ‘Introduction to Chess’ for my eighth birthday.

One night soon after my eighth birthday I followed my mother out the front door, suitcases towed behind.

I left the book by my bed with a bookmark just past the introduction. I left home with only a slight understanding of what seemed a trivial hierarchy: queens, bishops, pawns. I could align the figures in the correct order on the board but I didn’t know what came next.

I never learnt to play chess. Never had the patience to understand why some pieces had to move in one way and the queen in another.

Anisa Ghuloom

17

The finger’s hovering but the foot stays still The room is full but the seats are kept warm The glasses are empty but the bottles are in hand Press play so we can all dance.

Gary Harten

dancing

18

19

playing with Playing is not a choice.

Time is mother, A released child’s hand.

Bonds of wax Between each sun.

Rules are a reflection Buried in the sky.

And cross-dressing Night Encourages deceit.

Red button – faulty, Losing is the currency.

A team yields hope, Some play with time.

Lara Kennedy

20

time

Ella Frost

Up and down, back and forth. From blue sky to green grass and back again, swings, like roundabouts, have a tipping point. There is a split second when you’re moving so fast and going so high that you think that this feels like what you think it might be like to fly. It’s exhilarating and utterly terrifying. When my father used to push me on the swings, I would shout to be pushed higher and higher, until suddenly that point loomed so close that I would shout stop, stop: delight had spun into horror and I felt perilously out of control. Then I would lean far back, letting my head flop back from my neck, rocking backwards and forwards with deliberate slowness, feet ground into the grassy floor, and watch the parallel sky moving in front of my face like a slide show, safe in the knowledge that the distance between us was now fixed.

Sarah Sternberg

21

22

Lizzie Wheldon

23

www.heliconmagazine.co.uk